Author : Beej
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network byte order
their_addr.sin_addr = *((struct in_addr *)he->h_addr);
memset(&(their_addr.sin_zero), '\0', 8); // zero the rest of the struct
if ((numbytes=sendto(sockfd, argv[2], strlen(argv[2]), 0,
(struct sockaddr *)&their_addr, sizeof(struct sockaddr))) == -1) {
perror("sendto");
exit(1);
}
printf("sent %d bytes to %s\n", numbytes,
inet_ntoa(their_addr.sin_addr));
close(sockfd);
return 0;
}
And that's all there is to it! Run listener on some machine, then run talker on another. Watch them communicate! Fun G-rated excitement for the entire nuclear family!
Except for one more tiny detail that I've mentioned many times in the past: connected datagram sockets. I need to talk about this here, since we're in the datagram section of the document. Let's say that talker calls connect() and specifies the listener's address. From that point on, talker may only sent to and receive from the address specified by connect(). For this reason, you don't have to use sendto() and recvfrom(); you can simply use send() and recv().
These aren't really advanced, but they're getting out of the more basic levels we've already covered. In fact, if you've gotten this far, you should consider yourself fairly accomplished in the basics of Unix network programming! Congratulations!
So here we go into the brave new world of some of the more esoteric things you might want to learn about sockets. Have at it!
6.1. Blocking
Blocking. You've heard about it--now what the heck is it? In a nutshell, "block" is techie jargon for "sleep". You probably noticed that when you run listener, above, it just sits there until a packet arrives. What happened is that it called recvfrom(), there was no data, and so recvfrom() is said to "block" (that is, sleep there) until some data arrives.
Lots of functions block. accept() blocks. All the recv() functions block. The reason they can do this is because they're allowed to. When you first create the socket descriptor with socket(), the kernel sets it to blocking. If you don't want a socket to be blocking, you have to make a call to fcntl():
#include <unistd.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
.
.
sockfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
fcntl(sockfd, F_SETFL, O_NONBLOCK);
.
.
By setting a socket to non-blocking, you can effectively "poll" the socket for information. If you try to read from a non-blocking socket and there's no data there, it's not allowed to block--it will return -1 and errno will be set to EWOULDBLOCK.
Generally speaking, however, this type of polling is a bad idea. If you put your program in a busy-wait looking for data on the socket, you'll suck up CPU time like it was going out of style. A more elegant solution for checking to see if there's data waiting to be read comes in the following section on select().
6.2. select()--Synchronous I/O Multiplexing
This function is somewhat strange, but it's very useful. Take the following situation: you are a server and you want to listen for incoming connections as well as keep reading from the connections you already have.
No problem, you say, just an accept() and a couple of recv()s. Not so fast, buster! What if you're blocking on an accept() call? How are you going to recv() data at the same time? "Use non-blocking sockets!" No way! You don't want to be a CPU hog. What, then?
select() gives you the power to monitor several sockets at the same time. It'll tell you which ones are ready for reading, which are ready for writing, and which sockets have raised exceptions, if you really want to know that.
Without any further ado, I'll offer the synopsis of select():
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int select(int numfds, fd_set *readfds, fd_set *writefds,
fd_set *exceptfds, struct timeval *timeout);
The function monitors "sets" of file descriptors; in particular readfds, writefds, and exceptfds. If you want to see if you can read from standard input and some socket descriptor, sockfd, just add the file descriptors 0 and sockfd to the set readfds. The parameter numfds should be set to the values of the highest file descriptor plus one. In this example, it should be set to sockfd+1, since it is assuredly higher than standard input (0).
When select() returns, readfds will be modified to reflect which of the file descriptors you selected which is ready for reading. You can test them with the macro FD_ISSET(), below.
Before progressing much further, I'll talk about how to manipulate these sets. Each set is of the type fd_set. The following macros operate on this type:
FD_ZERO(fd_set *set) -- clears a file descriptor set
FD_SET(int fd, fd_set *set) -- adds fd to the set
FD_CLR(int fd, fd_set *set) -- removes fd from the set
FD_ISSET(int fd, fd_set *set) -- tests to see if fd is in the set
Finally, what is this weirded out struct timeval? Well, sometimes you don't want to wait forever for someone to send you some data. Maybe every 96 seconds you want to print "Still Going..." to the terminal even though nothing has happened. This time structure allows you to specify a timeout period. If the time is exceeded and select() still hasn't found any ready file descriptors, it'll return so you can continue processing.
The struct timeval has the follow fields:
struct timeval {
int tv_sec; // seconds
int tv_usec; // microseconds
};
Just set tv_sec to the number of seconds to wait, and set tv_usec to the number of microseconds to wait. Yes, that's microseconds, not milliseconds. There are 1,000 microseconds in a millisecond, and 1,000 milliseconds in a second. Thus, there are 1,000,000 microseconds in a second. Why is it "usec"? The "u" is supposed to look like the Greek letter µ (Mu) that we use for "micro". Also, when the function returns, timeout might be updated to show the time still remaining. This depends on what flavor of Unix you're running.
Yay! We have a microsecond resolution timer! Well, don't count on it. Standard Unix timeslice is around 100 milliseconds, so you might have to wait that long no matter how small you set your struct timeval.
Other things of interest: If you set the fields in your struct timeval to 0, select() will timeout immediately, effectively polling all the file descriptors in your sets. If you set the parameter timeout to NULL, it will never timeout, and will wait until the first file descriptor is ready. Finally, if you don't care about waiting for a certain set, you can just set it to NULL in the call to select().
The following code snippet waits 2.5 seconds for something to appear on standard input:
/*
** select.c -- a select() demo
*/
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#define STDIN 0 // file descriptor for standard input
int main(void)
{
struct timeval tv;
fd_set readfds;
tv.tv_sec = 2;
tv.tv_usec = 500000;
FD_ZERO(&readfds);
FD_SET(STDIN, &readfds);
// don't care about writefds and exceptfds:
select(STDIN+1, &readfds, NULL, NULL, &tv);
if (FD_ISSET(STDIN, &readfds))
printf("A key was pressed!\n");
else
printf("Timed out.\n");
return 0;
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