select($rin,undef,undef,undef) only blocking once

rabbit7 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

select() is only blocking the first time it gets executed. I want it to block everytime though, what am i doing wrong ?

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use POSIX qw(mkfifo);
use Fcntl qw(O_RDONLY O_NONBLOCK);



my $fifofile = "fifo";
my $inputbuf;

unlink($fifofile);
mkfifo($fifofile, 0666) or die (' can\'t create FIFO:'.$fifofile);
sysopen(FIFOFD, $fifofile, O_RDONLY | O_NONBLOCK ) or die ("can\'t rea
+d FIFO:'.$fifofile");


while (1){
    my $rin ='';

    vec($rin,0,1)=1;
    vec($rin,fileno(FIFOFD),1)=1;
    select( $rin, undef, undef, undef );
    print "select returning\n";
    
my $fromfifo;
while ( sysread(FIFOFD, $fromfifo, 1) == 1 ){
        $inputbuf .= $fromfifo ;
    }
    my $command;
    my $index;
        while ( $index = index($inputbuf,"\n" )+1 ){
            my $command =  substr($inputbuf,0,$index,"");
        if ( defined ($command) ) {
                print $command;
            }
        }
}
[download]

Comment on select($rin,undef,undef,undef) only blocking once Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: select($rin,undef,undef,undef) only blocking once by Tanalis (Curate) on Jul 26, 2005 at 10:14 UTC
The select function makes use of the C select(2) system call. As the docs for select(2) state, file descriptors "will be watched to see if characters become available for reading (more precisely, to see if a read will not block ... a file descriptor is also ready on end-of-file)" Once you've read data from the pipe once, the file pointer will be pointing at EOF, and hence the select call will always return ready. In a situation like this, I would consider using a blocking read over blocking on file readiness; ~~alternatively, look into the use of seek or sysseek to try to clear the file's EOF condition (which may not be possible - I can't test it here)~~. Hope that helps. -- Foxcub `#include www.liquidfusion.org.uk` Update: rabbit7 indicates that `sysseek` doesn't work with a fifo. Updated to reflect this.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: select($rin,undef,undef,undef) only blocking once by rabbit7 (Initiate) on Jul 26, 2005 at 11:30 UTC
sysseek() does not work on a FIFO it seems. would it be a solution to reopen the FIFO before the select statement ? it works, but i dont think that is the proper way.... Read more... code example (1121 Bytes)	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: select($rin,undef,undef,undef) only blocking once by Tanalis (Curate) on Jul 26, 2005 at 12:09 UTC
It'd seem to be. I still favour a blocking read over blocking using `select`, though - you're using two system calls (which are relatively expensive) to do the job of one (unless there's something I'm missing). Paraphrasing the Cookbook a little, replacing your loop with `for( ;; ) { open FIFO; "<", $fifofile or die $!; my $buf = <FIFO>; # blocks next unless defined $buf; chomp $buf; print $buf; close FIFO; }` [download] would seem to work as expected. Just as a final point, I'm not 100% sure what you're trying to achieve with your calls to `index` and `substr` - all you seem to be doing there is stripping the newline, which you can achieve using `chomp`. Hope that helps. -- Foxcub `#include www.liquidfusion.org.uk`	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^4: select($rin,undef,undef,undef) only blocking once by rabbit7 (Initiate) on Jul 26, 2005 at 13:43 UTC
Re^5: select($rin,undef,undef,undef) only blocking once by Tanalis (Curate) on Jul 26, 2005 at 13:49 UTC
Some notes below your chosen depth have not been shown here
Re: select($rin,undef,undef,undef) only blocking once by anonymized user 468275 (Curate) on Jul 26, 2005 at 09:40 UTC
select() only blocks until the filehandle is ready (from performing an implicit autoflush). Therefore, once this has happened the first time, nothing has changed in your loop to prevent the filehandle being ready instantly the second time around, so the blocking occurs thereafter for zero time. Update: I note that in the code the filehandle stays set to empty, which would default it to standard input - this could be creating an additional obstacle.. Hope this helps, Simon. One world, one people	[reply]


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