Network Programming with Perl

Using Nonblocking Handles with Line-Oriented I/O

As explained in Chapter 12, it's dangerous to mix line-oriented reads with select() because the select call doesn't know about the contents of the stdio buffers. Another problem is a line-oriented read blocks if there isn't a complete line to read; as soon as any I/O operation blocks, a multiplexed program stalls.

What we would like to do is to change the semantics of the getline() call so that we can distinguish among three distinct conditions:

1. A complete line was successfully read from the filehandle.

2. The filehandle has an EOF or an error.

3. The filehandle does not yet have a complete line to read.

The standard Perl <> operator and getline() functions handle conditions 1 and 2 well, but they block ...