You should 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. Here's one solution that works on BSD systems:
sub key_ready { local($rin, $nfd); vec($rin, fileno(STDIN), 1) = 1; return $nfd = select($rin,undef,undef,0); }
Under perl5, you should look into getting the ReadKey extension from your regular perl archive.
Other resources at this site: