gawk's inet hanging?

[Jeff Chua]

I'm trying put gawk inet connection to the local smtp port and would like it
to detect error conditions, but don't know how.

Here's the code ...

awk '
        BEGIN {
                GAWK_SOCK_RETRIES = 2;  # this doesn't seem to do anything
                serv = "/inet/tcp/0/localhost/25";
                print "help" |& serv;
       }
'


It works when sendmail is running. But when I stop sendmail, running the
above code just hangs without reporting any error. Running "telnet localhost
25" returns error right away.

Thanks,
Jeff