communicate with other processes, regardless of where they are running

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.