determining how much data is on a socket

[Erno Kuusela]

In article <91gu7q$6pj$1 at bob.news.rcn.net>, "Z 3 Penguin"
<z3penguin at penguinpowered.com> writes:

[reformatted - please keep your lines under 73 characters long]

| is there any way to find out how much data is waiting on a given
| socket?
[...]
| i would like to know if the bytes are waiting before i read, so that
| if they are not, my program can continue and try to read it later.
| any ideas?

you can't do this portably. most unixish systems support the
FIONREAD ioctl on sockets which does this.

the normal way to deal with this situation is to use select and/or
non-blocking sockets.

  -- erno