I''m giving 1000 micro secs for a read/write flag to fall. Seems to time out all the time. Am I being too stingy here or is there a bug in my code ?

Microseconds? As in millionths of a second? Uh, yeah, you''re being too stingy.

Tony

Yes, 1 millisecond.
Pings on the test network are about 16 milliseconds.

So select will in fact time out without even having a look, as it were ?

A pretty good maximum is 1 second, actually, though if you''re going to be dealing with a fast connection you could squeeze it down to 150 ms or so (that''s 150,000 microseconds).

The only reason I ever use the timeout feature is when I want a portable way to make the process sleep for a small amount of time. Usually, I want the program to see if there''s something available NOW so it can do other things while it''s waiting for input.