Name: rlT66838 Date: 07/23/97


We *really* would like to see a mechanism similar
to the select(3C) call in Unix/Posix. Basically,
you could give this mechanism a list of input
streams, and it would block until one (any one)
of the streams became available for reading.

You can currently get half of the way there
by using InputStream.available(), but you would
have to constantly poll over a set of InputStreams
calling available(), instead of blocking.

The immediate upshoot of a select mechanism would
be to solve a problem we have using Runtime.exec()
and Processes; that is, if you want to pipe
the new Process' stdin, stdout and stderr to
the normal ones (ie the terminal) you have to use
a seperate thread for each stream, otherwise
the buffers on those streams might become full
and the process will block.

Thank you for your time :)

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