Taken from the original at http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~beej/guide/net/ ... see end of writeup for Copyright statement.
send() and recv()--Talk to me, baby!
These two functions are for communicating over stream sockets or connected datagram sockets. If you want to use regular unconnected datagram sockets, you'll need to see the section on sendto() and recvfrom(), below.
The send() call:
int send(int sockfd, const void *msg, int len, int flags);
sockfd is the socket descriptor you want to send data to (whether it's the one returned by socket() or the one you got with accept().) msg is a pointer to the data you want to send, and len is the length of that data in bytes. Just set flags to 0. (See the send() man page for more information concerning flags.)
Some sample code might be:
char *msg = "Beej was here!";
int len, bytes_sent;
len = strlen(msg);
bytes_sent = send(sockfd, msg, len, 0);
send() returns the number of bytes actually sent out -- this might be less than the number you told it to send! See, sometimes you tell it to send a whole gob of data and it just can't handle it. It'll fire off as much of the data as it can, and trust you to send the rest later. Remember, if the value returned by send() doesn't match doesn't match the value in len, it's up to you to send the rest of the string. The good news is this: if the packet is small (less than 1K or so) it will probably manage to send the whole thing all in one go. Again, -1 is returned on error, and errno is set to the error number.
The recv() call is similar in many respects:
int recv(int sockfd, void *buf, int len, unsigned int flags);
sockfd is the socket descriptor to read from, buf is the buffer to read the information into, len is the maximum length of the buffer, and flags can again be set to 0. (See the recv() man page for flag information.)
recv() returns the number of bytes actually read into the buffer, or -1 on error (with errno set, accordingly.)
There, that was easy, wasn't it? You can now pass data back and forth on stream sockets! Whee! You're a Unix Network Programmer!
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Copyright © 1995, 1996 by Brian "Beej" Hall. This guide may be reprinted in any medium provided that its content is not altered, it is presented in its entirety, and this copyright notice remains intact. Contact email@example.com for more information.