Is there a portable way to tell if data is available on a pipe?

[John Nagle]

    I need some way to find out if a pipe has data available for
a read without blocking if it does not.

    "select", unfortunately, doesn't work on pipes on Windows.

    I think there's something proposed for Python 3000, but that's
not useful now.

    I'd like to avoid having a thread to manage each pipe, but if I
have to, so be it.

				John Nagle