use Perl

Well, I may have found The Right Way to accomplish my timed reads. Term::ReadKey has a ReadKey() function (exported by default) that accepts a timeout and returns a first keystroke or undef if the timeout occurs. So I can write a timed_read() routine around it which goes ahead and reads until $/ with <>, prepends the first character, and moves on.

I've already got a routine with IO::Select, but it appears to not be working sometimes, and I don't know why. Sometimes it times out when the input should be there. I'll implement the ReadKey() version and see if it makes a difference.

Of course, when I discovered ReadKey() gave me what I needed, I looked to see how it was implemented. The answer was that the author checks far more things about the system than I knew existed and then eval's one of many ReadKey() definitions into existence. Wow! Talk about a motivator for calling a module instead of cut-and-paste.

I'm doing all this over sockets, through inetd, just to be difficult, you know. :) One of the first things I checked with Term::ReadKey was if it would work with a socket. (Or, at least, a socket that looks like a STDIN.) BTW, I absolutely love the Net::DummyInetd module, removed from the libnet distribution, but still available unless the author has done housekeeping. (Like Matt Sergeant, who recently removed the older, pure-Perl version of Time::Object from CPAN before last Friday when I really needed it all of a sudden. I forgive you, Matt! :) ) DummyInetd.pm can let you write your programs for inetd without having to set up inetd yourself. (I let the sysadmins do that; they always want to keep control, anyway.)