Python for Unix and Linux System Administration

Chapter 5. Networking

Networking often refers to connecting multiple computers together for the purpose of allowing some communication among them. But, for our purposes, we are less interested in allowing computers to communicate with one another and more interested in allowing processes to communicate with one another. Whether the processes are on the same computer or different computers is irrelevant for the techniques that we’re going to show.

This chapter will focus on writing Python programs that connect to other processes using the standard socket library (as well as libraries built on top of socket) and then interacting with those other processes.

Network Clients

While servers sit and wait for a client to connect to them, clients initiate connections. The Python Standard Library contains implementations of many used network clients. This section will discuss some of the more common and frequently useful clients.

socket

The socket module provides a Python interface to your operating system’s socket implementation. This means that you can do whatever can be done to or with sockets, using Python. In case you have never done any network programming before, this chapter does provide a brief overview of networking. It should give you a flavor of what kinds of things you can do with the Python networking libraries.

The socket module provides the factory function, socket(). The socket() function, in turn, returns a socket object. While there are a number of arguments to pass to ...