How to wait only so long for a server to respond?

[Sean 'Shaleh' Perry]

On 03-Apr-2002 Ralph wrote:
> Pythoners:
> 
> I have some code that requests a response from a server on the Internet, 
> but I only want to wait so long for the server to respond.  How can I tell 
> python to wait x seconds/minutes, then move on to the next section of code 
> if the server has not responded?
> 
> Thanks as always.
> 

a select loop is a common way to wait for data on a socket and specify a
timeout.  Look for documentation on select().