Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] D-Bus support

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

frederic heem wrote:

> What about using select() + read() instead ?

If, for whatever reason, the application needs to ensure that it doesn't 
wait indefinitely for a packet to arrive, that's the way to do it.

Of course, if the only reason the application needs to ensure that is so 
that it can, for example, poll for input or 
output-buffer-space-available on other FDs, you can do that directly 
with select().

Due to a bug in the BPF implementations in some OSes (including the 
current version of OS X; it's fixed in current versions of most if not 
all of the free-software OSes with names ending with "BSD"), you need to 
put the pcap_t into non-blocking mode, put a timeout in the select() 
call, and try the pcap_t when select() returns regardless of whether it 
indicates that the FD for the pcap_t is readable or not.

Due to a bug in OS X 10.4[.x]'s implementation of poll() (namely that it 
does not work at all on *any* character special file, including 
ttys/ptys as well as BPF devices), you can't use poll() if the code has 
to run on Tiger.  (Note that the GLib event loop uses poll().)