Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment Third Edition
In the previous chapter, we looked at pipes, FIFOs, message queues, semaphores, and shared memory
the classical methods of IPC provided by various UNIX systems.These mechanisms allow processes running
on the same computer to communicate with one another.In this chapter, we look at the mechanisms that
allow processes running on different computers (connected to a common network) to communicate with
one another network IPC.
In this chapter, we describe the socket network IPC interface, which can be used by processes to communicate
with other processes, regardless of where they are running — on the same machine or on different machines.
Indeed, this was one of the design goals of the socket interface. The same interfaces can be used for both
intermachine communication and intramachine communication. Although the socket interface can be used to
communicate using many different network protocols, we will restrict our discussion to the TCP/IP protocol suite
in this chapter,since it is the de facto standard for communicating over the Internet.
