How to do simultaneous reads and writes to/from a socket?

[sonofason]

Hi, I am trying to create a simple text-based chat client. I have one thread (ithreads) listening for input that can arrive at any time from the chat server (using getline) and another thread accepting input from the user and sending it to the server (using print). The problem I am having is that while the listening thread waits for a new line of input in getline, it blocks the socket for writes from the other thread. I have done a similar thing in Java where this works just fine, ie reading from the input stream created from the socket doesn't prevent data from being written to the output stream on the same socket from another thread. I thought that sockets would work in a similar way in both Perl and Java, but either I am missing something, or they don't...? How should I solve this problem? I would appreciate any thoughts and ideas. Are there other ways besides using IO::Select and non-blocking IO? Thanks, sonofason