Using UNIX-Domain Sockets | Network Programming with Perl

	Network Programming with Perl By Lincoln D. Stein Slots : 1
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	Part 4: Advanced Topics

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Chapter 22. UNIX-Domain Sockets

In previous chapters we focused on TCP/IP sockets, which were designed to allow processes on different hosts to communicate. Sometimes, however, you'd like two or more processes on the same host to exchange messages. Although TCP/IP sockets can be used for this purpose (and often are), an alternative is to use UNIX-domain sockets, which were designed to support local communications.

The advantage of UNIX-domain sockets over TCP/IP for local interprocess communication is that they are more efficient and are guaranteed to be private to the machine. A TCP/IP-based service intended for local communications would have to check the source address of each incoming client to accept only those originating from the local host.

Once set up, UNIX-domain sockets look and act much like TCP/IP sockets. The process of reading and writing to them is the same, and the same concurrency-managing techniques that work with TCP/IP sockets apply equally well to UNIX-domain sockets. In fact, you can write an application for UNIX-domain sockets and then reengineer it for use on the network just by changing the way it sets up its sockets.

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