Advanced Programming in the UNIX® Environment, Third Edition

17. Advanced IPC

17.1. Introduction

In the previous two chapters, we discussed various forms of IPC, including pipes and sockets. In this chapter, we look at an advanced form of IPC—the UNIX domain socket mechanism—and see what we can do with it. With this form of IPC, we can pass open file descriptors between processes running on the same computer system, server processes can associate names with their file descriptors, and client processes running on the same system can use these names to rendezvous with the servers. We’ll also see how the operating system provides a unique IPC channel per client.

17.2. UNIX Domain Sockets

UNIX domain sockets are used to communicate with processes running on the same machine. Although Internet domain sockets ...