select

Calls select(2) system call. It monitors given arrays of IO objects, waits one or more of IO objects ready for reading, are ready for writing, and have pending exceptions respectably, and returns an array that contains arrays of those IO objects. It will return nil if optional timeout value is given and no IO object is ready in timeout seconds.

Parameters

read_array

an array of IO objects that wait until ready for read

write_array

an array of IO objects that wait until ready for write

error_array

an array of IO objects that wait for exceptions

timeout

a numeric value in second

Example

rp, wp = IO.pipe
mesg = "ping "
100.times {
  rs, ws, = IO.select([rp], [wp])
  if r = rs[0]
    ret = r.read(5)
    print ret
    case ret
    when /ping/
      mesg = "pong\n"
    when /pong/
      mesg = "ping "
    end
  end
  if w = ws[0]
    w.write(mesg)
  end
}

produces:

ping pong
ping pong
ping pong
(snipped)
ping