> I can get the script to behave as expected when content's piped to it > using sys.stdin but I'd like to know that there's data coming from > stdin or fail and print the useage again. Is there a simple way to > achieve this?
There are more experienced UNIXers here, but from my POV I don't see how that can happen. The reason is simply that - sys.stdin alwasy exists (unless you close it yourself) - in a pipe (which this essentially is) there is now way to know if there is more date to come or not, except for the "broken pipe" error - but that won't happen to you, as sys.stdin is not broken just because there is currently no data arriving. The only thing I can think of is to introduce a timeout. If no data has arrived for a certain amount of time, you terminate. That could be achieved using either threads, or non-blocking IO. However, it's a heuristic. If your aunt sally starts the program and wants to feed it manually, but is slow because she first has to fetch her glasses from the kitchen, she'll think you're nasty because you terminated her program... Diez -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
