Question

Does anybody know if select.select() works with regular files or just with sockets/pipes?

I’ve tried on Solaris, Linux and Mac OS X – it doesn’t block on select.select() call.

It just explodes my brain, trying something like this with no luck

import os
import select

fds = [ os.open("read.txt", os.O_RDONLY) ]

while True:
    reads, _, _ = select.select(fds, [], [], 2.0)
    if 0 < len(reads):
        print "-> ",os.read(reads[0], 10)
    else:
        print "timeout"

Answer 1

From the documentation:

Note that on Windows, it only works
for sockets; on other operating
systems, it also works for other file
types (in particular, on Unix, it
works on pipes). It cannot be used on
regular files to determine whether a
file has grown since it was last read.

Does that help?