title: What does "select((select(s),$|=1)[0])" do in Perl?
body: <p>I've seen some horrific code written in Perl, but I can't make head nor tail of this one:</p>
  
  <pre><code>select((select(s),$|=1)[0])
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It's in some networking code that we use to communicate with a server and I assume it's something to do with buffering (since it sets <code>$|</code>).</p>
  
  <p>But I can't figure out why there's multiple <code>select</code> calls or the array reference. Can anyone help me out?</p>