my $input;
 sysread( \*STDIN, $input, 1024);
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Update: I forgot to mention you can set the nonblocking flag on STDIN

use Fcntl;
  
fcntl(\*STDIN, F_SETFL, O_NONBLOCK) || die "$!\n";
# Set the non-block flags
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I tried several versions of adding \*STDIN to the select and using sysread but I finally got soo close by using a separate thread to run in a while(1) loop doing a sysread. However, now when the stream starts flowing it hangs after a while until I provide some input and then works normally. I tried setting the nonblock flag as you mention above but then I get a new error: Your vendor has not defined Fcntl macro F_SETFL. Any help with this?

You might want to post a new node, describing your platform. First try this threaded attempt.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Term::ReadKey;
use threads;

$|++;

# I commented out some possible ReadMode settings
#ReadMode('cbreak');

# works non-blocking if read stdin is in a thread
my $thr = threads->new(\&read_in)->detach;

# loop to keep main thread alive
while(1){
print "test\n";
sleep 1;
}

#ReadMode('normal'); # restore normal tty settings


sub read_in{
        while(1){
         my $char;
         if (defined ($char = ReadKey(0)) ) {
            print "\t\t$char->", ord($char),"\n";    
            #process key presses here
            if($char eq 'q'){exit}
            #if(length $char){exit}  # panic button on any key :-)
            }
          }
}

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