Perhaps you might benefit from having a look at the answers from the last time this question was asked:

- Non blocking read on a filehandle

One example that was reported to work was the one about halfway down using Fcntl. Only worked on UNIX though, which doesn't seem like it will be a hindrance for you.

Although setting select's timeout to 0 doesn't work, you could set a minimal timeout like 0.01 (1 ms) which might work in your current implementation scheme, but is still inelegant.

In reply to Re: How to tell if a pipe opened for reading has data to be read by saintly
in thread How to tell if a pipe opened for reading has data to be read by Anonymous Monk

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