>Just removing the select() call works fine.

For this simple example yes, not for more complicated cases.  My particular application is a transparent HTTP proxy which needs to be able to serve multiple connections at once and handle keep-alive connections.  (The proxy connects to local server processes through unix sockets, which is why I can't use a regular HTTP proxy.  Send me email if you want more details about why I'm doing this.)  Without writing a full-blown HTTP-aware proxy, select (or something like it) is necessary.

Upon further study, though, I have come to the conclusion that this is not actually a bug (since select is doing what it is advertised to do), just very counter-intituitive behavior.  If select is going to accept file objects as arguments it ought to do the Right Thing with them IMO.