15.1 select -- Waiting for I/O completion
This module provides access to the select() and poll() functions available in most operating systems. Note that on Windows, it only works for sockets; on other operating systems, it also works for other file types (in particular, on Unix, it works on pipes). It cannot be used on regular files to determine whether a file has grown since it was last read.
The module defines the following:
- The exception raised when an error occurs. The accompanying value is a pair containing the numeric error code from errno and the corresponding string, as would be printed by the C function perror().
- (Not supported by all operating systems.) Returns a polling object, which supports registering and unregistering file descriptors, and then polling them for I/O events; see section 15.1.1 below for the methods supported by polling objects.
-
This is a straightforward interface to the Unix select()
system call. The first three arguments are sequences of `waitable
objects': either integers representing file descriptors or
objects with a parameterless method named fileno() returning
such an integer. The three sequences of waitable objects are for input,
output and `exceptional conditions', respectively. Empty sequences are
allowed, but acceptance of three empty sequences is platform-dependent.
(It is known to work on Unix but not on Windows.) The optional
timeout argument specifies a time-out as a floating point number
in seconds. When the timeout argument is omitted the function
blocks until at least one file descriptor is ready. A time-out value
of zero specifies a poll and never blocks.
The return value is a triple of lists of objects that are ready: subsets of the first three arguments. When the time-out is reached without a file descriptor becoming ready, three empty lists are returned.
Among the acceptable object types in the sequences are Python file objects (e.g.
sys.stdin, or objects returned by open() or os.popen()), socket objects returned by socket.socket().You may also define a wrapper class yourself, as long as it has an appropriate fileno() method (that really returns a file descriptor, not just a random integer). Note: File objects on Windows are not acceptable, but sockets are. On Windows, the underlying select() function is provided by the WinSock library, and does not handle file descriptors that don't originate from WinSock.
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Release 2.5, documentation updated on 19th September, 2006.