16.9. Summary

In this chapter, we looked at the IPC mechanisms that allow processes to communicate with other processes on different machines as well as within the same machine. We discussed how socket endpoints are named and how we can discover the addresses to use when contacting servers.

We presented examples of clients and servers that use connectionless (i.e., datagram-based) sockets and connection-oriented sockets. We briefly discussed asynchronous and nonblocking socket I/O and the interfaces used to manage socket options.

In the next chapter, we will look at some advanced IPC topics, including how we can use sockets to pass file descriptors between processes running on the same machine.