Core out a Cylinder

I would like do draw a cylinder (Quadric) with many polygons intersecting it. Then I would like the volume inside the cylinder to clear out and erase any of the intersections that remain inside the tube. I have looked into glStencilfunc/glStencilOp and it looked promising, but I couldn’t get it to work right. Any suggestions?

Do a search for CSG (constructive solid geometry) and OpenGL. I think Brad Grantham and some other folks from SGI did some work on that. If I remember correctly, you can do general CSG, but I think it had some limitations with respect to how it left the depth buffer. I could be wrong, though.