TCP connection in python. Do you know how to print a timer whilst the socket is waiting to accept a connection request?

Question

I set up a timer in the socket. If it hasn't received any connection requests in 30 seconds, the program finishes. Anyway, I'd like to print those 30 seconds into stdout as a timer, so that the user can see how much seconds are left. If there's a connection request before the timer expires, I'd like to stop the timer and keep executing the code as if nothing had happened. Any help? This is a fragment of my code:

while True:

    try:
        s_TCP.settimeout(30) 
        print ("Waiting for a connection...")
        s_TCP.listen(1)

        #I'd like to set the timer here

        connection, addr= s_TCP.accept()
        print ("\nConnection established")


    except socket.timeout:
        print ("Timer expired")
        s_TCP.close()
        sys.exit()

    except socket.error:

        print ("Couldn't connect to the client")
        s_TCP.close()
        sys.exit()

Thanks in advance!!

Answer 1

The trivial answer is to set a shorter timeout and try to accept several times. Because the socket is already listen ing, no connection attempts will be lost “between” the calls to accept . Remember to reset the timeout to whatever larger value after accepting a connection.