What does {built-in method select} do in Python 3?

Question

When profiling my application using cProfile and pstats, one of the rows reads:

ncalls  tottime  percall  cumtime  percall filename:lineno(function)
     6    2.940    0.490    2.940    0.490 {built-in method select}

What does this method do and when is it executed?

Answer 1

select.select is an interface to the Unix select() system call.