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From: wesommer@athena.mit.edu (William Sommerfeld)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Use of select in NeWS.
Message-ID: <3189@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 24 Feb 88 15:18:51 GMT
References: <1376@vaxb.calgary.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: wesommer@athena.mit.edu (William Sommerfeld)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 18

In article <1376@vaxb.calgary.UUCP> radford@calgary.UUCP (Radford Neal) writes:
>The above code will break horribly if UNIX is ever extended to
>allow more than 32 file descriptors.

It already has been; 4.3BSD has extended select in just the manner you
described.

This was dealt with for X a long time ago; evidently the Sun people
don't consider the 4.3 enhancements worth it..

main(){printf("%d\n",getdtablesize());} prints 64 on my system, and it
can be configured higher than this.

Perhaps they weren't _that_ concerned with portability, or else they
wanted to make sure than NeWS ran better on their hardware than on
anything else (so everyone buys their hardware to get the best
version..).

					- Bill