I don't believe that is the problem. If Perl gets partial data from a socket and that partial data doesn't contain the current value of $/, then <STDIN> is going to issue another read until it either gets a string that contains the current value of $/ or it gets end-of-file. (Well, that is my impression and testing confirms it but the perl source code involved is quite complex with lots of possible routes through the code depending on #ifdefs and big ifs, so there may be some cases where this doesn't happen -- if so, I'd appreciate validation of this fact.)

But, in general, this feature usually ends up being a good reason to not use <SOCK> to read from sockets. Certainly, if you do use <SOCK> to read from sockets, be sure to have $/ set appropriately.

For this case, I would think that "appropriately" would mean having $/ set to undef so that <STDIN> reads until end-of-file. But that strategy won't work unless the client requests that end-of-file be sent by using shutdown. But then, if the client doesn't use shutdown than the server has no reliable way to determine when all of the data has been received and it would have to resort to some sort of timeout logic.

evilstevel, feel free to provide more details if our guessing hasn't helped yet. (:

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")