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I am trying to spoof non-blocking reads on a Win32 client. I have spent a lot of time looking around at various code examples. The vec()..select() method on <STDIN> does not work. ReadLine in TERM::Readkey doesn't work either. but the ReadKey function does. Here is my code;

#!/usr/bin/perl 
use Term::ReadKey;

until ($Name){
     print "Your callsign?>";
     chomp ($Name = <>);
     if ($Name) {
         print "say: !! to exit\n\n";
         open (TX, ">>d:/telnet/say.txt");
         printf TX time." $Name entered.\n";
         close (TX);
        }
    }

$Lastime = time;
while($key.$Input ne "!!"){

open (RX, "<d:/telnet/say.txt");
@Said = <RX>;
close (RX);
foreach $Said(@Said){
     $Said =~ m/(^\d+)(\s[\D \d]*)/;
     if ($1 >= $Lastime){
         print $2;
         Tmptime = $1;
        }
    }
$Lastime = $Tmptime + 1;

if ($key = ReadKey 2){
     print $key;
     if (ord($key) != 13){
         chomp($Input = <>);
        }
     else {
         $key="";
         $Input = "";
        }
     open (TX, ">>d:/telnet/say.txt");
     printf TX time." $Name said: $key$Input\n";
     close (TX);
        
    }
}

open (TX, ">>d:/telnet/say.txt");
printf TX time." $Name left.\n";
close (TX);
        
print "\n\nBye.";
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It's a basic realtime chat client. It's not entirely bulletproof and it's not very efficient because it reads the whole say.txt file every 2 seconds. I can work on these limitations later.

The part I really need to fix is; Because the first keypress interrupts the ReadKey block it has to be printed to the console seperately. Thus if the user wants to delete their input, they can't delete the first character. Is there any way to inject it into the console instead?

I know this thing is built with dark magic and it has inherrent corruption but I have been on this quest for weeks and this is the best solution I have come up with so far. All suggestions for improvement would be greatly appreciated.

In reply to Non Blocking input on Win32 platforms by MisterH

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