What is socket programming in C?

Answer 1

There is nothing called "socket programming in C."

Sockets can be programmed in any programming language. What follows below is a basic idea on how to program sockets.

Socket programming refers to the use of a set of APIs for sending and receiving data over a network. The socket APIs originated on the BSD OS standardized by POSIX and are now found on UNIX, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS.

The concept of a socket is an abstraction for an end point in network communication through which data can be sent to and received from.

The major socket API functions are:

* socket() -- creates a socket of specified type and protocol * bind() -- assigns a local name or address to the socket (in the IP protocol this is usually an IP address and port * connect() -- connects a socket to a remote end point * listen() -- changes the socket's state to listen for incoming connections * accept() -- accepts an incoming connection and returns a new socket for communication over that connection * send() -- send data to remote end point specified with connect() call * sendto() -- in connectionless protocols such as UDP, sends data to a specified remote end point * recv() -- receive data from remote end point (after connection established) * recvfrom() -- receive data from a specified remote end point in connectionless protocol * getsockopt() -- gets current value for a particular socket option

* setsocketoption() -- set value of a particular socket option