How can I tell whether theres a character waiting on a filehandle?
The very first thing you should do is look into getting the Term::ReadKey extension from CPAN. As we mentioned earlier, it now even has limited support for non-portable (read: not open systems, closed, proprietary, not POSIX, not Unix, etc) systems. You should also check out the Frequently Asked Questions list in comp.unix.* for things like this: the answer is essentially the same. It’s very system dependent.
