problem with Device::SerialPort

Hi.

I've been googling all afternoon now but wasn't able to find my problem
mentioned someplace, but if for some reason my google-fu was weak,
please direct me to the appropriate place and allow me to hide myself in
shame.

Anyway.

What I have:
PC running linux, perl installed, Device::SerialPort is installed.
There is a device (Varian Multigauge) connected via RS232, that should
be sending data to the serial port.
when using minicom, i can send a command like e.g.
#0002I1
and receive a value (a pressure) as an answer, which will look like
>8.496E-11
(which only has a carriage return at the end, no linefeed, no newline).

the problem is: this works only once. i.e. I send the command, I get one
answer. What we want: continuous data logging (like e.g. once every 5
seconds) in order to be able to later plot a curve with gnuplot or
whatever.

So I read the docs for Device::SerialPort and the examples and came up
with the following try to do just what is described above, i.e. send the
command once and receive an answer:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# black magic taken from examples that came with the distribution
BEGIN { $| = 1; print "varianlog loaded "; }
END {print "not ok 1\n" unless $loaded;}
use Device::SerialPort;
$loaded = 1;
print "ok 1\n";
# end of black magic

use strict;
my $file = "/dev/tts/0";
my $out;
my $gotit;

my $ob = Device::SerialPort->new($file) || die("Can't open $file: $!\n");

$ob->baudrate(9600) || die("can't set baudrate\n");
$ob->parity("none") || die("can't set parity\n");
$ob->databits(8) || die("can't set databits\n");
$ob->stopbits(1) || die("can't set stopbits\n");
$ob->handshake("none") || die("can't set handshake\n");

$ob->write_settings || die("settings failed\n");

$ob->are_match("\r");
$ob->lookclear;

$out="#0002I1";
$ob->write($out) || die("writing to serial port failed: $!\n");
$ob->write_drain;

$ob->error_msg(1);
$ob->user_msg(1);

$gotit = "";
until ("" ne $gotit) {
$gotit = $ob->lookfor || die("couln't read from device: $!\n");
die("Abortet without match\n") unless(defined $gotit);
sleep 1;
}

print("we have read: $gotit\n");
$ob->close || die("failed to close: $!\n");
undef $ob;



But when I run this, it gets fine up to the point of the lookfor, where
it will fail with "resource temporarily unavailable". When I removed the
lookfor and tried to do just a pure $ob->read, I got "illegal seek" as
an answer. So does anyone have any tips as to what I'm doing wrong here?

--
Michael Hellwig aka The Eye olymp.idle.at admin
to contact me via email, use michael.hellwig@uni-ulm.de
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