Chapter 15
Sockets
In this chapter, you look at yet another method of process communication, but one with a crucial difference from those we’ve discussed in Chapters 13 and 14. Until now, all the facilities we’ve discussed have relied on shared resources on a single computer system. The resource varies; it can be file system space, shared physical memory, or message queues, but only processes running on a single machine can use them.
The Berkeley versions of UNIX introduced a new communication tool, the socket interface, which is an extension of the concept of a pipe, covered in Chapter 13. Socket interfaces are available on Linux. You can use sockets in much the same way as pipes, but they include communication across a network of computers. A process on one machine can use sockets to communicate with a process on another, which allows for client/server systems that are distributed across a network. Sockets may also be used between processes on the same machine.
Also, the sockets interface has been made available for Windows via a publicly available specification called Windows Sockets, or WinSock. Windows socket services are provided by a Winsock.dll system file. So, Windows programs can communicate across a network to Linux and UNIX computers and vice versa, thus implementing client/server systems. Although the programming interface for WinSock isn’t quite the same as UNIX sockets, it still has sockets as its basis.
We can’t cover the extensive Linux networking capabilities ...
