From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2004-07-24T08:19:02+09:00
Subject: Re: [Q] Is there any way to do a non-blocking TCPSocket#recv?

Warren Brown wrote:
> I am trying to create a simple socket monitor program in Ruby.  The idea
> is to listen for an "inbound" connection, then open an "outbound" socket
> and forward all of the traffic both ways while logging the traffic.  In
> order to do this, I need to be able to tell if there is data available
> to receive before doing the TCPSocket#recv, since #recv blocks if there
> isn't any (instead of simply returning 0 bytes or nil). There is no
> #select method in any of the classes to test for data availability, so
> I'm stuck.  I would think this is a common thing to want to do, but
> there doesn't seem to be any way to do it using the socket library.
> What am I missing?

What about putting each socket handler in a thread and using two queues 
to pass data between threads? (I'm ignorant, but I think internally ruby 
will use select() to schedule these threads to run when data is coming in.)