Socket Addressing
In order for one process to talk to another, each of them has to know the other's address. Each networking domain has a different concept of what an address is. For the UNIX domain, which can be used only between two processes on the same host machine, addresses are simply paths on the host's filesystem, such as /usr/tmp/log. For the Internet domain, each socket address has three parts: the IP address, the port, and the protocol.
IP Addresses
In the currently deployed version of TCP/IP, IPv4, the IP address is a 32-bit number used to identify a network interface on the host machine. A series of subnetworks and routing tables enables any machine on the Internet to send packets to any other machine based on its IP address.
Get Network Programming with Perl now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
