sending a file through sockets

[brueckd at tbye.com]

On Fri, 5 Jul 2002, Bryan Olson wrote:

>  > Anyway, here's some sample code, but if
>  > you're not already familiar with sockets then you should spend a little
>  > time experimenting with them.
> 
> Did you test this?

Heaven's no! ;-) I shoulda included the standard 'not tested' disclaimer, 
although I use similar code all the time...

>  The Python library uses the empty string for
> INADDR_ANY, which is fine for bind(), but I don't think it's legal for
> connect().

Try it and be amazed! ;-)

> I understand it's a basic demo, but I'll note that any real application
> requires some time-out discipline to avoid very long hangs.

Depends on your definition of 'real' of course. The simplest thing to do
is just import timeoutsocket and set a default timeout and then the posted
code works without modification. In my really real (production) code I
usually use poll anyway, but I don't think that would have helped the OP 
much.

>  Also on
> most Unix systems we'd need to watch out for signals that force system
> calls to return.

Hmm.. really depends on your application and which signals. For example, 
signal 2 gets translated into a Python KeyboardInterrupt, so you wouldn't 
handle it any differently. Most other signals kill the interpreter, which 
is fine with me.

-Dave