An interesting question has come up in the development of the SSL module. The function ssl.wrap_socket() takes a flag, do_handshake_on_connect, which tells it whether to do the SSL handshake before returning an SSLSocket object to the caller. If the socket being wrapped is non-blocking, the code in wrap_socket() must invoke do_handshake() multiple times, and effectively block until the handshake is done. Right now, I'm doing it with this loop: if do_handshake_on_connect: # have to loop to support non-blocking sockets while True: try: self.do_handshake() break except SSLError, err: if err.args[0] == SSL_ERROR_WANT_READ: select.select([self], [], []) elif err.args[0] == SSL_ERROR_WANT_WRITE: select.select([], [self], []) else: raise But this seems fragile to me. "select" and/or "poll" is awfully system-dependent. What I'd like to do is just use the socket API, something like: blocking = self.getblocking() try: self.setblocking(1) self.do_handshake() finally: self.setblocking(blocking) But there's no "getblocking" method on sockets. Instead, there's "gettimeout". So I'd write something like timeout = self.gettimeout() try: self.setblocking(1) self.do_handshake() finally: if (timeout == 0.0): self.setblocking(0) But my mother taught me never to test for equality against floating-point zero. But in this case it might just fly... Or, should I just set the timeout: timeout = self.gettimeout() try: self.settimeout(None) self.do_handshake() finally: self.settimeout(timeout) This is the solution I'm leaning towards... Any recommendations? Bill