in reply to Perl select function mystery

Thank everyone for the clarification, duff's tutorial is quite helpful.

I am acutally reading the code of Mail::SpamAssassin::SpamdForkScaling which spamd daemon use for children scaling.
There is a method main_server_poll which communicates parent with childrens, it involves vec,fileno, select, timeout, error handling in that method. it is fun and pain to read it :)