Hello phillipdhall, and welcome to the Monastery!

The error arises because File::Tail::select expects each element of your @handles array to be a File::Tail object. So, you would need to create a File::Tail object initialised with STDIN. Except you can’t, because the documentation for the constructor rules this out:

name
 This is the name of the file to open. The file will be opened for reading. This must be a regular file, not a pipe or a terminal (i.e. it must be seekable).

So, it seems you will need to find a different approach. Maybe something using a timeout? (See the example code for the select method.)

I can’t experiment, as File::Tail won’t install on Windows. :-(

Per the File::Tail documentation:

select is intended to enable the programmer to simoultaneously wait for input on normal filehandles and File::Tail filehandles. Of course, you may use it to simply read from more than one File::Tail filehandle at a time.

Your answer makes sense because it doesn't seem to work, but I'd say that documentation is quite misleading. I did find this bug that may be related, but it hasn't been updated in 7 years, so I'm guessing development on this module stopped a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

So for now, I believe the fork/thread methods suggested by aitap and zentara are my next learning adventure...

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

$|++;

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

while(1){
print "test\n";
sleep 1;
}

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__
[download]

For anyone else searching, what I ended up doing was a little more simple. Looking into forking and threading was intimidating, since I'd need variables to be passed between the two and didn't understand how that worked.

Since both standard select() and File::Tail::select have timeouts, I loaded STDIN and the File::Tail object in the appropriate one, and read from each inside a loop. Kinda silly how simple that seems to me now.

I was initially concerned about performance when doing so, but then I guess all that each select method is doing is reading in a timed loop anyway. My method seems to be working great. Thank you to those who provided input.

You can try opening and reading /dev/stdin or /proc/self/fd/0 on UNIX-like systems (at least on GNU/Linux).

Another way is to use fork to process your file and the command line (see Term::ReadLine, Term::ReadKey etc.) in separate processes.