How can I test STDIN without blocking in Perl?

Question

I\'m writing my first Perl app -- an AOL Instant Messenger bot that talks to an Arduino microcontroller, which in turn controls a servo that will push the power button on our sy

Answer 1

The Perl built-in is select(), which is a pass-through to the select() system call, but for sane people I recommend IO::Select.

Code sample:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use IO::Select;

$s = IO::Select->new();
$s->add(\*STDIN);

while (++$i) {
  print "Hiya $i!\n";
  sleep(5);
  if ($s->can_read(.5)) {
    chomp($foo = );
    print "Got '$foo' from STDIN\n";
  }
}