in reply to communication between programs

On Windows you can also use shared memory for IPC, see forking with Storable and IPC::ShareLite

For an example of setting up forking with sockets and IO::Select, see Non-Blocking Bidirectional Communication using Unix Sockets, although it says its for unix only, it may be the way the socketpair is setup. Also see Non-blocking socket read on Windows

And if you want to get low level, see Re: Please suggest a non-forking way to do this (OS: windows) (solution)

And I will mention that Glib supports select on win32 pipes, see Re: working with 2 inputs

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom