unbuffered read from socket

[Forsaken]

esteemed monks, i beg for another moment of your valuable time

still tinkering around with my irc scripts... ;-)

situation is as follows. i have a number of socket connections open, which are managed by IO::Select in order for me to know which ones have data waiting to be read. the data itself comes from an irc server and thus follows a predictable pattern, in that the traffic is composed by lines followed by \n, so i know what i can expect. right now i am using the following to read the data one line at a time:

$char = '';
until ($char eq "\n")
{
  sysread($filehandle, $char, 1);
  $line .= $char;
}

after which $line gets processed and the whole thing starts all over again. somehow this reading 1 char at a time seems really cumbersome, not to mention prone to problems in case of unforeseen circumstances. I would highly appreciate your insight on this matter.

Update:
looks like I'm not the only who's been faced with this question. Apparently a module IO::Getline was capable of reading data from an unbuffered socket one line at a time, although so far I have been unsuccesful in tracking it down. Another suggestion was to read in data at more than 1 byte at a time, but as far as i know, when trying to read more than x bytes when only x bytes are waiting the read will block? Is there a way to determine not only IF there is data waiting, but also how much?