What is af unix domain

Python Javascript Linux Cheat sheet Contact. Tags: Sockets Unix Network Protocols. Related Connect a M. Can cURL send requests to sockets? Buy the book! First, the address of the socket is a path on the filesystem, rather than a tuple containing servername and port. Second, the node created in the filesystem to represent the socket persists after the socket is closed, and needs to be removed each time the server starts up. The echo server example from earlier can be updated to use UDS by making a few changes in the setup section.

The client setup also needs to be modified to work with UDS. So, why would one use a UNIX socket? Exactly for the reason above: communication between processes on the same host, being a lightweight alternative to an INET socket via loopback.

A UNIX socket doesn't have to deal with any of those problems, since everything is designed to be local to the machine, so its code is much simpler and the communication is faster. Granted, you will probably notice the difference only under heavy load, e. Open a socket pair socketpair.. Write to one of the pair arrives at the other. The kernel routes messages without protocol or filesystem overhead. I like non-blocking with select and datagram can get a length mode but you can choose your own.

Be sure to delete the temporary file on exit it will have zero bytes but will still show up in the filesystem directory. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Asked 7 years, 10 months ago. Therefore, UNIX domain sockets provide an advantage over Internet sockets to which anyone can connect, unless extra authentication logic is implemented. IPC within a Unix host by may be accomplished by several other means including named pipes.

What circumstances favor UNIX domain sockets versus pipes? The choice is influenced by these factors:. Stream sockets provide bi-directional communication while named pipes are uni-directional. Clients using sockets each have an independent connection to the server. With named pipes, many clients may write to the pipe, but the server cannot distinguish the clients from each other-- the server has only one descriptor to read from the named pipe.

Since pipes have these limitations, UNIX domain sockets should be used if there are multiple clients that need to be distinguishable or which write long messages to the server.