Network Programming with Perl

Summary

A socket is an endpoint for communications. In Perl, a socket looks and acts much like a filehandle. There are several species of socket distinguished by their address families, type, and communications protocol. The most frequently used sockets belong to the AF_INET (Internet) address families, and use either the stream-oriented TCP protocol or the datagram-oriented UDP protocol.

UNIX-domain sockets use addresses based on local filenames, whereas Internet-domain sockets use a combination of IP address and port number. Addresses must be packed into binary form before passing them to any of Perl's built-in network functions.

Perl provides a complete set of functions for interconverting the numeric and symbolic forms of host addresses, ...