Short Sleeps

You need to sleep for less than a second.

Use the select() function, if your system supports it:

select(undef, undef, undef, $time_to_sleep);

Some systems don't support a four-argument select. The Time::HiRes module provides a sleep function that takes a floating point number of seconds:

use Time::HiRes qw(sleep); sleep($time_to_sleep);

Here's an example of select. It's a simpler version of the program in . Think of it as your very own 300-baud terminal.

while (<>) {
 select(undef, undef, undef, 0.25);
print;
}

Using Time::HiRes, we'd write it as:

use Time::HiRes qw(sleep); while (<>) {
 sleep(0.25);
print;
}