This chapter describes the GNU facilities for interprocess communication using sockets.
A socket is a generalized interprocess communication channel.
Like a pipe, a socket is represented as a file descriptor. But,
unlike pipes, sockets support communication between unrelated
processes, and even between processes running on different machines
that communicate over a network. Sockets are the primary means of
communicating with other machines; telnet, rlogin,
ftp, talk, and the other familiar network programs use
sockets.
Not all operating systems support sockets. In the GNU library, the header file `sys/socket.h' exists regardless of the operating system, and the socket functions always exist, but if the system does not really support sockets, these functions always fail.
Incomplete: We do not currently document the facilities for broadcast messages or for configuring Internet interfaces.
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