This predicate waits for at most TimeOut seconds. TimeOut may be specified as a floating point number to specify fractions of a second. If TimeOut equals infinite, wait_for_input/3 waits indefinitely. If Timeout is 0 or 0.0 this predicate returns without waiting.^{101Prior to 7.3.23, the integer value‘0' was the same as infinite.}

This predicate can be used to implement timeout while reading and to handle input from multiple sources and is typically used to wait for multiple (network) sockets. On Unix systems it may be used on any stream that is associated with a system file descriptor. On Windows it can only be used on sockets. If ListOfStreams contains a stream that is not associated with a supported device, a domain_error(waitable_stream, Stream) is raised.

The example below waits for input from the user and an explicitly opened secondary terminal stream. On return, Inputs may hold user_input or P4 or both.

?- open('/dev/ttyp4', read, P4),
   wait_for_input([user_input, P4], Inputs, 0).

When available, the implementation is based on the poll() system call. The poll() puts no additional restriction on the number of open files the process may have. It does limit the time to 2^31-1 milliseconds (a bit less than 25 days). Specifying a too large timeout raises a representation_error(timeout) exception. If poll() is not supported by the OS, select() is used. The select() call can only handle file descriptors up to FD_SETSIZE. If the set contains a descriptor that exceeds this limit a representation_error(’FD_SETSIZE') is raised.

Note that wait_for_input/3 returns streams that have data waiting. This does not mean you can, for example, call read/2 on the stream without blocking as the stream might hold an incomplete term. The predicate set_stream/2 using the option timeout(Seconds) can be used to make the stream generate an exception if no new data arrives within the timeout period. Suppose two processes communicate by exchanging Prolog terms. The following code makes the server immune for clients that write an incomplete term:

    ...,
    tcp_accept(Server, Socket, _Peer),
    tcp_open(Socket, In, Out),
    set_stream(In, timeout(10)),
    catch(read(In, Term), _, (close(Out), close(In), fail)),
    ...,