From a syntatical point of view, it doesn't matter whether or not that place is a file, a monitor, or some IP connection to another machine. The OS is what routes the data to the file, monitor, or IP connection. ... The problem with Windows is that you cannot bind STDIN/STDOUT as descriptors.

Under win32, the standard input, output, and error are file handles just like any others. The underlying OS primitive WriteFile is given a file handle and a buffer to write. If they couldn't be treated in a uniform manner, redirection on the command line wouldn't work, would it?

I think I see what you're getting at. The program can run as a normal command-line, writing to stdout. Or, you can invoke it with some flag and it listens to a socket and accepts a connection, and then uses that socket instead of stdout.

So, the program is written to use $out for all its writes. Why doesn't that work for you? It works fine for me. I've written code that takes a file descriptor as a parameter, and it has no problems with passing \*STDOUT.

Other than being predefined, STDIN and STDOUT behave just like any other file descriptor in Perl. You could re-point STDOUT to the socket handle, for example, instead of using $out in all your print statements. (or you could use select to make $out the default).

—John