title: socket programming: How do I handle out of band data
body: <p>I just looked into <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-band#Computing" rel="noreferrer">wikipedia's entry on out-of-band data</a> and as far as I understand, OOB data is somehow flagged more important and treated as ordinary data, but transmitted in a seperate stream, which profoundly confuses me.</p>
  
  <p>The actual question would be (besides "Could someone explain what OOB data is?"):</p>
  
  <p>I'm writing a unix application that uses sockets and need to make use of <a href="http://linux.die.net/man/2/select" rel="noreferrer">select()</a> and was wondering what to do with the exceptfds parameter? Do I need to put all my sockets into this parameter and react to such events? Or do I just ignore them?</p>