fsockopen, and remaining data in buffer

Hello Guys! I'm having troubles with not knowing the amount of data which is waiting to be received in the buffer for a specific socket I can use fsockopen, establish a connection, and write to the socket, I can read from the socket just fine as well. The trouble I'm running into is illustrated in this example Eg: Open a socket to an ftp site (port 21). I can expect a banner from EG: the ftp server, but this is not always the case. if there is a EG: banner it is usually only one line, but this is not always the case. EG: I can then fputs($fp, 'user anonymous'.chr(10)); After that fputs I EG: can expect one line to be in the buffer. I then fputs($fp, 'pass EG: anonymsou@email.com'.chr(10)); There can then be anything from 0 to EG: (lots) of bytes in the buffer, spanning multiple lines. I want to be able to pull all of the waiting information out of the socket, process it, and then proceed - not knowing the amount of data to expect. A while( $data=fgets($fp, 9999) ) works, but either a) hangs when there is no more data to receive, or b) times the socket out when a socket timeout on the file pointer is used, or c) is VERY unreliable when the socket is set to non-blocking mode. I've tried using $var=socket_get_status($fp), but then $var['unread_bytes'] is always 0 or null... Am I missing something? The development server is running slackware 8, kernel 2.4.18, apache-1.3.24, and php 4.2 I'll send sample code if asked, Thanks in advance for the help! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ - -- Demitrious S. Kelly -- Eagle Networks ------------------------------------------------------------------------ - ------------------------------------------------------------------------ - -- Demitrious S. Kelly -- Eagle Networks ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -