How can I test STDIN without blocking in Perl?

The Perl built-in is select(), which is a pass-through to the select() system call, but for sane people I recommend IO::Select.

Code sample:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use IO::Select;

$s = IO::Select->new();
$s->add(\*STDIN);

while (++$i) {
  print "Hiya $i!\n";
  sleep(5);
  if ($s->can_read(.5)) {
    chomp($foo = <STDIN>);
    print "Got '$foo' from STDIN\n";
  }
}

I found that IO::Select works fine as long as STDOUT gets closed, such as when the upstream process in the pipeline exits, or input is from a file. However, if output is ongoing (such as from "tail -f") then any partial data buffered by <STDIN> will not be displayed. Instead, use the unbuffered sysread:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use IO::Select;
$s = IO::Select->new(\*STDIN);

while (++$i) {
        if ($s->can_read(2)) {
                last unless defined($foo=get_unbuf_line());
                print "Got '$foo'\n";
        }
}

sub get_unbuf_line {
        my $line="";
        while (sysread(STDIN, my $nextbyte, 1)) {
                return $line if $nextbyte eq "\n";
                $line .= $nextbyte;
        }
        return(undef);
}