Bug in CERN Library of common code ?

Yezdi Lashkari (yezdi@media.mit.edu)
Mon, 10 Apr 1995 19:39:34 +0500


Hi,
I've been using the CERN Library of common code to
pull in WWW documents and parse them for a certain
database I am building and I keep running into this
problem for certain documents.

The library code makes the http connection to the server,
and then waits forever to get the status line. The
library code doesnt seem to have a select or a timeout
as to how long it waits. This is a problem because the
process waits forever for a server to send a line of data
which never arrives. I know I could use the multi-threaded
version in which case I wouldnt block forever but I'd still
have unfinished calls hanging around. This also happens sometimes
when the library makes a call to get the body of the document
and it never arrives.

I was wondering whether anyone had run into this problem before and
if so how to fix it. I'd like the call to terminate after a certain
timeout when this happens so that the rest of the documents
in the database can be parsed. I grepped through the NCSA libwww
that comes with XMosaic 2.4 and they have select calls there -
should I just use the NCSA libwww or is there an easy fix for
the CERN one ?

Please reply directly to me as I don't read the list very often.

thanks,
Yezdi