6/22    I have a select() and read() question. I'm using select() in order to
        figure out whether or not a given socket fd has anything to read within
        the timeout. If the socket doesn't have anything to read, then I close
        the connection, as I'm trying to prevent a dos connection attack.
        Now my problem is this: if select() returns a given socket fd I try to
        read from it, read() will block if there are less than the specified
        number of bytes available on the socket, which is bad because someone
        can still do a connection based dos. What's the standard way of dealing
        with this problem? Threads? Alarm timers?
        \_ the solution is to make the fd O_NONBLOCK using ioctl() after you
           open the fd. subsequent reads will not block if there isn't
           enough data. instead, they read as much as is available and
           return it. -ali
           \_ Thanks. I'll try it out.