note graff Do you have any method at all (apart from a perl script) that can let you know that stuff really does come in from the serial port? It would be a comfort, at least, to rule out hardware problems (e.g. having a badly wired RS-232 connector). <P> Apart from that, you might need to be more explicit about the file handle discipline being used for reading from the port. You seem to be using a default read protocol, whereby a line-termination pattern (probably "\r\n" in your case) needs to be detected by perl in order to return a value from the file handle via the <c><PORT></c> read operation. <P> How about trying a [doc://read] or [doc://sysread] instead? That is, something that will read some quantity of bytes, regardless of whether there's any specific "record delimiter" character to be looked for. <i>update:</i>It wouldn't be a bad idea to use one of these functions to read just one byte at a time; that way, it's unlikely that anything will be missed by virtue of being "cached" by the file-handle object. 1007081 1007081