Use of select does not solve the original problem, but just replaces it with a race condition. A socket can get closed between select returning writability and you doing the write. In that case he will run into exactly the same problem, the program will exit with a broken pipe message. It will just be more rare since you made the problem window smaller.

Also, if you go select based, do not use <> (readline) and print (ok, you can if you are very careful). select only guarantees one read or write respectively (and even that one isn't absolutely guaranteed) These buffered operations can use multiple reads and writes.