Perl Sockets

[plunkett]

Hi. I'm using IO::socket::INET to act as a client to connect to a chat server. My Problem is that when i'm waiting to get data from the socket, I can't do anyting else (like sending keep-alive message every two minutes to keep from getting disconnected!). Here is a piece of code to illistrate what i'm saying...

while (1)
{
$MySocket->recv($text,256);

if (($currenttime + 120) <= time()) # Used for keep-alive.
{
$currenttime = time();
$MySocket->send("Jp\n");
print "Ping?\n";
}
}

THe Conditional isn't reached until the socket receives data, which means that if the socket never receives data, nothing happens! Can anyone help?

 

[PaulTEG]

Could you fork a keep alive child process?
--Paul

 

[MikeLacey]

plunkett,

You can create a non-blocking mode connection like this

   $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(Listen    => 5,
                                 LocalAddr => 'localhost',
                                 LocalPort => 9000,
                                 Blocking  => 0,
                                 Proto     => 'tcp');

As I understand the documentation this would make your call to recv() return immediately even if there was nothing to receive.

You can then go ahead with your check for a need for a keepalive thing, sleep for a short while then call recv() again in your loop.

Mike

"Deliver me from the bane of civilised life; teddy bear envy."

Want to get great answers to your Tek-Tips questions? Have a look at faq219-2884

 

[plunkett]

dang, for some reason that doesn't work..

It says bad file descriptor...

 

[MikeLacey]

Oh :-( I got from the documentation as well. What version of Perl are you running? I'm on 5.8.1

Mike

"Deliver me from the bane of civilised life; teddy bear envy."

Want to get great answers to your Tek-Tips questions? Have a look at faq219-2884

 

[plunkett]

I'm using 5.8.3