I confess that I'm a bit surprised that IO doesn't provide that facility. I could see it implementing a version of getline{} that took a timeout and gave you either the line you asked for or an error. I expect that {as you said} that functionality keeps getting reinvented, so it is a bit odd that over the years no one has added that to the IO family.

Many many years ago I wrote a server in Perl and I had to do just as you said: the low-level sub had to read a byte at a time then assemble the response and return a complete line. I only remember it being kinda clunky but worked. And I wish I still had the code I wrote to do that :)

<update2> Please disregard the following code example, I was pointed to Mojo::IOLoop::Stream::Role::LineBuffer which makes the implementation much nicer - many thanks to the fine people on #mojo on freenode! See this example instead. </update2>

<update> Note that this uses the slightly lower-level API instead of the higher-level one shown at the top of Mojo::IOLoop. However, I don't yet see a easy way to use one of the existing readline modules with that interface (Mojo::IOLoop::LineReader or MojoX::LineStream, the latter has a bug and doesn't support changing the input record separator). I may have another update in a little while, we'll see. </update>

POE.. it seems awfully complicated for something as simple as what I need {basically *nothing* more than an unblocking read} Is there a less complicated package that provides the simple functionality I need?

Yes, I agree POE has an "interesting" interface, although once you get into it, it works well. As I mentioned, Mojolicious includes an event loop whose interface I find nicer. There's also Mojo::IOLoop::LineReader that handles the buffering and splitting of read events into lines:

mojo_serv.pl:

use warnings;
use strict;
use Data::Dump qw/dd pp/;
use Mojo::IOLoop::Server;
use Mojo::IOLoop::LineReader;

my $server = Mojo::IOLoop::Server->new;
$server->on(accept => sub {
    my ($serv, $handle) = @_;
    my $peer = $handle->peerhost.":".$handle->peerport;
    print $peer,": Connect\n";
    my $stream = Mojo::IOLoop::LineReader->new($handle);
    $stream->timeout(30);
    $stream->on(readln => sub {
        my ($strm, $line) = @_;
        print $peer,": Got line ",pp($line),"\n";
    });
    $stream->on(close => sub {
        print $peer,": Closed\n";
        $stream->stop;
        $stream = undef; # free reference
    });
    $stream->on(error => sub {
        my ($strm, $err) = @_;
        warn "$peer: Error: $err";
    });
    $stream->start;
    $stream->write("Hello, client from $peer.\n");
});
$server->listen(address => '127.0.0.1', port => 3000, reuse => 1);
$server->start;

$server->reactor->start unless $server->reactor->is_running;
[download]

mojo_cli.pl:

use warnings;
use strict;
use Data::Dump qw/dd pp/;
use Mojo::IOLoop::Client;
use Mojo::IOLoop::LineReader;

my $client = Mojo::IOLoop::Client->new;
$client->on(connect => sub {
    my ($cli, $handle) = @_;
    print "Connect\n";
    my $stream = Mojo::IOLoop::LineReader->new($handle);
    $stream->timeout(10);
    $stream->on(readln => sub {
        my ($strm, $line) = @_;
        print "Got line ",pp($line),"\n";
    });
    $stream->on(close => sub {
        print "Closed\n";
        $stream->stop;
        $stream = undef; # free reference
    });
    $stream->on(error => sub {
        my ($strm, $err) = @_;
        warn "Error: $err";
    });
    $stream->start;
    $stream->write("Hello, server, I am a client.\n");
});
$client->on(error => sub {
    my ($cli, $err) = @_;
    warn "Error: $err";
});
$client->connect(address => '127.0.0.1', port => 3000);
 
$client->reactor->start unless $client->reactor->is_running;
[download]

Here's some semi-tested client code that reads what it can. then does the inner loop for each whole line.

# cli.pl:

use strict;
use warnings;
use IO::Select;
use IO::Socket;

my $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new('127.0.0.1:1235') or die "sock: $@";
my $sel = IO::Select->new($sock);

my $buffer = '';

while(@1 = $sel->can_read(2) and sysread $sock, $buffer, 4096, length 
+$buffer)
  {
  while( $buffer =~ s/^.*\n// )
    {
    my $line = $&;
    print "got: ", $line; # or whatever processing you want here...
    }
  }
die @1 ? "socket closed" : "timeout";
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If you change the read size to 1 you get the read-a-byte-at-a-time behavior.

That last bit is perfect, and pretty much exactly what I did to do a read loop over an ssh connection. And a good thing: ::Linereader looked like just the right thing, but:

  FERREIRA/Mojo-IOLoop-LineReader-0.3.tar.gz
  C:\STRAWB~1\c\bin\gmake.exe test -- NOT OK
//hint// to see the cpan-testers results for installing this module, t
+ry:
  reports FERREIRA/Mojo-IOLoop-LineReader-0.3.tar.gz
Stopping: 'install' failed for 'Mojo::IOLoop::LineReader'.
Failed during this command:
 FERREIRA/Mojo-IOLoop-LineReader-0.3.tar.gz   : make_test NO
[download]

I must have bad luck. On another thread I discovered that SVG::TT::Graph::XY wouldn't install, either. Thanks!