newbie: closing unused connection + readline

I don't understand why read.table would have a problem reading
directly from a socket instead of a textConnection. ?Is this a bug?
Some subtlety in the semantics of socketConnection as opposed to
textConnection? ?Incorrect parameters when opening the
socketConnection?

No problem with socketConnection and read.table. I want to read a line
at a time but when I use
read.table (socketConnection)  then it waits till client socket
connection is closed; and entire data comes in as one big chunk. I am
reading a line at a time since data will be available after every few
seconds and I can process and obtain results of already generated
data.

Should I use some (eof) character in data so that read.table returns
without client closing socket connection and I can read a line too?

Thanks for your time sir(s).

Regards
-Aval.