OK, I know that I can set $/ = undef; to read in an entire file at one time, but what if I am reading in an unknown amount of data with an unknown terminator? I want to read in the data one character at a time, and use an alarm signal to catch when no more data is being received. My question is, "Can this be done?" I haven't been able to figure out how to set $/ to catch one character at a time. or some other way of reading off of a filehandle that will catch one character at a time.

In reply to $/ question by raflach

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