On 3/22/06, Alexandru E. Ungur <alexandru / globalterrasoft.ro> wrote:

>   body = Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse(url))
>
> and I do know that the target script (url) takes a long time to do
> its processing and to return the data to the calling script, so
> that's why I want get() to ignore any timeouts (or to set them high
> enough).

Have you tried the following?
(from "Example 3: More generic GET+print" in the docs)

require 'net/http'
require 'uri'

url = URI.parse('http://www.example.com/index.html')

res = Net::HTTP.start(url.host, url.port) {|http|
  http.read_timeout = 600
  http.get('/index.html')
}

body = res.body

- Dimitri