Petri Lehtinen added the comment: To me, there's also a valid use case on Unix; A parent process forks and execs, wanting to share a socket to the executed child process. The best way for the child to create a socket object is to use the fileno parameter of socket.socket(). ---------- nosy: +petri.lehtinen _______________________________________ Python tracker http://bugs.python.org/issue16802 _______________________________________