Running separate code while a socket server is running?

How can I have a socket server running that accepts incoming connections and deals with that part of the code, while not having code waiting for new connections stuck in that same loop?

I am just starting trying to learn. Would a TCP Handler be useful?

I just need some simple examples on this topic. I'm wanting something like having a commands portion in the server. So i can do certain thin开发者_如何学编程gs while the server is running.

EDIT: What I'm trying to do:

1 - TCP server for multiple clients
2 - Respond to more than one at a time when needed
3 - Text input availability at all time, to be used for getting/setting info
4 - A simple way to get/save client address info. Currently using a list to save them. 

You can run your socket server in a thread.

import threading
import SocketServer

server = SocketServer.TCPServer(('localhost', 0), SocketServer.BaseRequestHandler)
th = threading.Thread(target=server.serve_forever)
th.daemon = True
th.start()

Python has builtin support of asynchronous socket handling in asyncore module (http://docs.python.org/library/asyncore.html).

Asynchronous socket handling means that You have to execute at least one iteration of socket processing loop inside Your code (main loop):

asyncore.loop(count=1)

Example taken from documentation:

import asyncore
import socket

class EchoHandler(asyncore.dispatcher_with_send):

    def handle_read(self):
        data = self.recv(8192)
        if data:
            self.send(data)

class EchoServer(asyncore.dispatcher):

    def __init__(self, host, port):
        asyncore.dispatcher.__init__(self)
        self.create_socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
        self.set_reuse_addr()
        self.bind((host, port))
        self.listen(5)

    def handle_accept(self):
        pair = self.accept()
        if pair is None:
            pass
        else:
            sock, addr = pair
            print('Incoming connection from %s' % repr(addr))
            handler = EchoHandler(sock)

server = EchoServer('localhost', 8080)
# Note that here loop is infinite (count is not given)
asyncore.loop()

Each time the socket accepts the connection handle_accept is called by the loop. Each time the data is available to read from socket handle_read is called and so on.

You can use both TCP and UDP sockets in this manner.

I'm not exactly sure what you are asking, but normally on the server side, you make socket(), bind() and listen() calls to setup the socket, and then loop around an accept() call. This accept() call blocks until a client connection is made.

For simple servers, you handle whatever request the client makes within the loop. For real-world servers, you need to spawn some other mechanism (e.g. a new thread or process, depending on the language/platform) to handle the request asynchronously, so that the original loop can iterate again on the accept() call and go back to listening for connections.

See the Python socket doc for more info and examples in Python:

http://docs.python.org/howto/sockets.html