I'm crazy and just set the socket to nonblocking. Then you can use time, a character, or both to stop reading from a socket. 
$flags=fcntl(SOCK,F_GETFL,0);
fcntl(SOCK,F_SETFL,$flags | O_NONBLOCK);

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In reply to Re: When do I stop reading? by c-era
in thread When do I stop reading? by jen

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