The Sockets Networking API: UNIX® Network Programming Volume 1, Third Edition

Chapter 18. Routing Sockets

Introduction

Traditionally, the Unix routing table within the kernel has been accessed using ioctl commands. In Section 17.9, we described the two commands that are provided, SIOCADDRT and SIOCDELRT, to add or delete a route. We also mentioned that no command exists to dump the entire routing table, and instead programs such as netstat read the kernel memory to obtain the contents of the routing table. One additional piece to this hodgepodge is that routing daemons such as gated need to monitor ICMP redirect messages that are received by the kernel, and they often do this by creating a raw ICMP socket (Chapter 28) and listening on this socket to all received ICMP messages.

4.3BSD Reno cleaned up the interface to the kernel’s ...