Socket Programming Question:

File Descriptors:

File Descriptors are the fundamental I/O object. You read(2) and write(2) to file descriptors.

int cc, fd, nbytes;
char *buf;

cc = read(fd, buf, nbytes);
cc = write(fd, buf, nbytes)

The read attempts to read nbytes of data from the object referenced by the file descriptor fd into the buffer pointed to by buf. The write does a write to the file descriptor from the buffer. Unix I/O is a byte stream.

File descriptors are numbers used for I/O. Usually the result of open(2) and creat(2) calls.

All Unix applications run with stdin as file descriptor 0, stdout as file descriptor 1, and stderr as file descriptior 3. But stdin is a FILE (see stdio(3S)) not a file descriptor. If you want a stdio FILE on a file descriptor use fdopen(3S).

Sockets:

A Socket is a Unix file descriptor created by the socket(3N) call -- you don't open(2) or creat(2) a socket. By way of comparison pipe(2) creates file descriptors too -- you might be familiar with pipes which predate sockets in the development of the Unix system.

int s, domain, type, protocol;
s = socket(domain, type, protocol);
etc...
cc = read(s, buf, nbytes);

The domain parameter specifies a communications domain (or address family). For IP use AF_INET but note that socket.h lists all sorts of address families. This is to inform the system how an address should be understood -- on different networks, like AF_DECnet, addressing may be longer than the four octets of an IP number. We're only concerned with IP and the AF_INET address family.

The type parameter specifies the semantics of communication (sometimes know as a specification of quality of services). For TCP/IP use SOCK_STREAM (for UDP/IP use SOCK_DGRAM). Note that any address family might support those service types. See socket.h for a list of service types that might be supported.

A SOCK_STREAM is a sequenced, reliable, two-way connection based byte stream. If a data cannot be successfully transmitted within a reasonable length of time the connection is considered broken and I/O calls will indicate an error.

The protocol specifies a particular protocol to be used with the socket -- for TCP/IP use 0. Actually there's another programmers interface getprotobyname(3N) that provides translates protocol names to numbers. It's an interface to the data found in /etc/protocols -- compare with the translation of service names to port numbers discussed above.