C Socket Programming for Linux with a Server and Client Example Code

by Himanshu Arora on December 19, 2011

Typically two processes communicate with each other on a single system through one of the following inter process communication techniques.

Pipes
Message queues
Shared memory

There are several other methods. But the above are some of the very classic ways of interprocess communication.

But have you ever given a thought over how two processes communicate across a network?

For example, when you browse a website, on your local system the process running is your web browser, while on the remote system the process running is the web server. So this is also an inter process communication but the technique through which they communicate with each other is SOCKETS, which is the focus of this article.

What is a SOCKET?

In layman’s term, a Socket is an end point of communication between two systems on a network. To be a bit precise, a socket is a combination of IP address and port on one system. So on each system a socket exists for a process interacting with the socket on other system over the network. A combination of local socket and the socket at the remote system is also known a ‘Four tuple’ or ‘4-tuple’. Each connection between two processes running at different systems can be uniquely identified through their 4-tuple.

There are two types of network communication models:

OSI
TCP/IP

While OSI is more of a theoretical model, the TCP/IP networking model is the most popular and widely used.

As explained in our TCP/IP Fundamentals article, the communication over the network in TCP/IP model takes place in form of a client server architecture. ie, the client begins the communication and server follows up and a connection is established.

Sockets can be used in many languages like Java, C++ etc but here in this article, we will understand the socket communication in its purest form (i.e in C programming language)

Lets create a server that continuously runs and sends the date and time as soon as a client connects to it.

Socket Server Example

#include <sys/socket.h>
#include <netinet/in.h>
#include <arpa/inet.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <time.h> 

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    int listenfd = 0, connfd = 0;
    struct sockaddr_in serv_addr; 

    char sendBuff[1025];
    time_t ticks; 

    listenfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
    memset(&serv_addr, '0', sizeof(serv_addr));
    memset(sendBuff, '0', sizeof(sendBuff)); 

    serv_addr.sin_family = AF_INET;
    serv_addr.sin_addr.s_addr = htonl(INADDR_ANY);
    serv_addr.sin_port = htons(5000); 

    bind(listenfd, (struct sockaddr*)&serv_addr, sizeof(serv_addr)); 

    listen(listenfd, 10); 

    while(1)
    {
        connfd = accept(listenfd, (struct sockaddr*)NULL, NULL); 

        ticks = time(NULL);
        snprintf(sendBuff, sizeof(sendBuff), "%.24s\r\n", ctime(&ticks));
        write(connfd, sendBuff, strlen(sendBuff)); 

        close(connfd);
        sleep(1);
     }
}

In the above program, we have created a server. In the code :

The call to the function ‘socket()’ creates an UN-named socket inside the kernel and returns an integer known as socket descriptor.
This function takes domain/family as its first argument. For Internet family of IPv4 addresses we use AF_INET.
The second argument ‘SOCK_STREAM’ specifies that the transport layer protocol that we want should be reliable ie it should have acknowledgement techniques. For example : TCP
The third argument is generally left zero to let the kernel decide the default protocol to use for this connection. For connection oriented reliable connections, the default protocol used is TCP.
The call to the function ‘bind()’ assigns the details specified in the structure ‘serv_addr’ to the socket created in the step above. The details include, the family/domain, the interface to listen on(in case the system has multiple interfaces to network) and the port on which the server will wait for the client requests to come.
The call to the function ‘listen()’ with second argument as ’10’ specifies maximum number of client connections that server will queue for this listening socket.
After the call to listen(), this socket becomes a fully functional listening socket.
In the call to accept(), the server is put to sleep and when for an incoming client request, the three way TCP handshake* is complete, the function accept () wakes up and returns the socket descriptor representing the client socket.
The call to accept() is run in an infinite loop so that the server is always running and the delay or sleep of 1 sec ensures that this server does not eat up all of your CPU processing.
As soon as server gets a request from client, it prepares the date and time and writes on the client socket through the descriptor returned by accept().

Three way handshake is the procedure that is followed to establish a TCP connection between two remote hosts. We might soon be posting an article on the theoretical aspect of the TCP protocol.

Finally, we compile the code and run the server.

Socket Client Example

#include <sys/socket.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <netinet/in.h>
#include <netdb.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <arpa/inet.h> 

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    int sockfd = 0, n = 0;
    char recvBuff[1024];
    struct sockaddr_in serv_addr; 

    if(argc != 2)
    {
        printf("\n Usage: %s <ip of server> \n",argv[0]);
        return 1;
    } 

    memset(recvBuff, '0',sizeof(recvBuff));
    if((sockfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0)) < 0)
    {
        printf("\n Error : Could not create socket \n");
        return 1;
    } 

    memset(&serv_addr, '0', sizeof(serv_addr)); 

    serv_addr.sin_family = AF_INET;
    serv_addr.sin_port = htons(5000); 

    if(inet_pton(AF_INET, argv[1], &serv_addr.sin_addr)<=0)
    {
        printf("\n inet_pton error occured\n");
        return 1;
    } 

    if( connect(sockfd, (struct sockaddr *)&serv_addr, sizeof(serv_addr)) < 0)
    {
       printf("\n Error : Connect Failed \n");
       return 1;
    } 

    while ( (n = read(sockfd, recvBuff, sizeof(recvBuff)-1)) > 0)
    {
        recvBuff[n] = 0;
        if(fputs(recvBuff, stdout) == EOF)
        {
            printf("\n Error : Fputs error\n");
        }
    } 

    if(n < 0)
    {
        printf("\n Read error \n");
    } 

    return 0;
}

In the above program, we create a client which will connect to the server and receive date and time from it. In the above piece of code :

We see that here also, a socket is created through call to socket() function.
Information like IP address of the remote host and its port is bundled up in a structure and a call to function connect() is made which tries to connect this socket with the socket (IP address and port) of the remote host.
Note that here we have not bind our client socket on a particular port as client generally use port assigned by kernel as client can have its socket associated with any port but In case of server it has to be a well known socket, so known servers bind to a specific port like HTTP server runs on port 80 etc while there is no such restrictions on clients.
Once the sockets are connected, the server sends the data (date+time) on clients socket through clients socket descriptor and client can read it through normal read call on the its socket descriptor.

Now execute the client as shown below.

$ ./newsc 127.0.0.1
Sun Dec  18 22:22:14 2011

We can see that we successfully got the date and time from server. We need to send the IP address of the server as an argument for this example to run. If you are running both server and client example on the same machine for testing purpose, use the loop back ip address as shown above.

To conclude, In this article we studied the basics of socket programming through a live example that demonstrated communication between a client and server processes capable of running on two different machines.

Add your comment

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Comments on this entry are closed.

cee December 19, 2011, 4:18 am

Thank you for this (yet another) great article. Sometimes I think you can read my mind. Socket programming is exactly what I wanted to take a look at next.
Keep up the great work with your site/books.
kind regards
cee

∞
Shanil from Fiji December 19, 2011, 2:49 pm

Great Article, good for us engineers here in the Pacific Island countries. Very helpful, Electronics combined with Computing Science. Awesome combination. The Geek Stuff rocks!!

∞
Abhijeet Kasurde December 19, 2011, 10:11 pm

Great article.Thank you for sharing this information. I would like to hear about new ‘systemd’ in Linux World from GeekStuff

∞
Banu December 20, 2011, 3:02 am

Awesome article and site. Great information sharing about Unix admin and internals. Looking other great info from Geek!!

∞
Himanshu December 21, 2011, 3:40 am

Thank you all for your appreciation. 🙂

∞
Leslie Satenstein December 22, 2011, 10:48 pm

Article is very appropriate. Nice work.

One question. memset(), did you want to initialize the variables with hex 30 (‘0’) or did you mean ” or does it make a difference?

∞
Himanshu December 23, 2011, 12:47 am

@Leslie Satenstein
I think that is a typo. It should have been either ” or 0.
Thanks for pointing out.

∞
Leslie Satenstein December 25, 2011, 1:32 pm

For some reason, the backslash next to the 0 yields a ” on display
I would just put a zero single character into the memset() command.
It gets converted to a hex zero character.

∞
Pragmatic Programmer December 28, 2011, 11:50 pm

Great stuff Himanshu! This is a very good primer for Socket programming.
One suggestion here (for the coding style, nothing related to Socket programming)

Instead of
char sendBuff[1025];
and then
memset(sendBuff, ‘0’, sizeof(sendBuff));

char sendBuff[1025] = {0};
works equally well.
I know this is not a coding tutorial, but just mentioned hope you don’t mind 🙂

Cheers.

∞
Himanshu December 29, 2011, 1:28 am

@Pragmatic Programmer

Hey thanks for the optimization. Yes, its a better way to achieve the desired value in array. Thanks for your input.

Cheers!!!

∞
deepak kumar January 2, 2012, 6:33 am

nice article.helpful

∞
himanshu January 2, 2012, 9:48 am

@deepak

Thanks!!!!

∞
Chetan March 20, 2012, 12:31 pm

i liked it, and thank you for helping me through this.

∞
Vijay Kanta April 9, 2012, 4:11 am

This was what I was looking for, and it served my purpose almost. Good one!

∞
prashant dubey (varanasi) June 21, 2012, 10:55 pm

this is to good program for the learning student because this program syntax is user friendly……. thanks to upload…..
(” MCA “) with IGNOU

∞
kavya July 23, 2012, 10:55 am

hey frnds..! i wanna learn “C socket programming” am a beginner so suggest some websites for me..!
B.Tech IT

∞
Himanshu July 23, 2012, 11:02 pm

@kavya
You can start here :
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2333

∞
agnel brilya August 18, 2012, 4:01 am

good nd thanx a lot 🙂

∞
nicks August 23, 2012, 2:41 am

Helping a lot during Boring Lab

∞
Pawan September 4, 2012, 7:18 am

Hi, Himanshu,
I am totally new to Socket programming. I have few questions, Is the both Server and Client code .c files are on same machine? If Yes, Did you compile both .c files together? What exactly is this : ./newsc

Thanks

∞
Farhad September 12, 2012, 1:21 am

Hi Himanshu,
i just tried to make few changes in the server program to reply back to the client with “pinged” data instead of “Date+Time” .

This is the changes i have made in server program,but one problem is,i should get the pined data on client console(like Date+Time),but i am getting the pinged data on the server console only.

#include // change made
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
int listenfd = 0, connfd = 0;
struct sockaddr_in serv_addr;

char sendBuff[1025];
// time_t ticks; //change made

listenfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
memset(&serv_addr, ‘0’, sizeof(serv_addr));
memset(sendBuff, ‘0’, sizeof(sendBuff));

serv_addr.sin_family = AF_INET;
serv_addr.sin_addr.s_addr = htonl(INADDR_ANY);
serv_addr.sin_port = htons(5000);

bind(listenfd, (struct sockaddr*)&serv_addr, sizeof(serv_addr));

listen(listenfd, 10);

while(1)
{
connfd = accept(listenfd, (struct sockaddr*)NULL, NULL);

// ticks = time(NULL); //change made
// snprintf(sendBuff, sizeof(sendBuff), “%.24s\r\n”, ctime(&ticks)); //change made
system(“ping NULL”); //change made
snprintf(sendBuff, sizeof(sendBuff), “%.24d\r\n”, system(“ping 10.0.2.15”)); //change made

write(connfd, sendBuff, strlen(sendBuff));

close(connfd);
sleep(1);
}
}

∞
Himanshu Arora September 12, 2012, 10:14 am

@Farhad

Well, I think that the following line is wrong :

snprintf(sendBuff, sizeof(sendBuff), “%.24d\r\n”, system(“ping 10.0.2.15″)); //change made

I think you should first go through the man pages of snprintf() function and system() function to understand how are they used.

∞
jayasri September 20, 2012, 12:04 am

Thanks,Good article(very useful for freshers).

∞
bbb October 2, 2012, 7:59 am

it was help full …. try to explain inet_pton() function and its arguments in detail

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rosy October 19, 2012, 2:53 am

thnx alot it’s Helping a lot during Boring lecture , but i need som help in assignment
that need ;
The client sends the server a 16-bit integer (short) that represents the number of integers that it will
follow in the input. For example, if the client sends the server 9, then that means that the client is
going to send the server 9 integer numbers. Then, the server computes the sum and average of the

if you can help me .. 🙂 thnx alot
numbers sent by the client and sends them (i.e., the sum and average) to the client. Finally, the client
should receive those results and print them out
Your input should be read from the keyboard as an ASCII character string.

∞
Farah October 20, 2012, 3:53 am

Very nice tutorial Himanshu 🙂

Unfortunately it’s not working with me. Maybe you can help me out a bit.
I installed ubuntu on a virtual machine. I have windows installed on my laptop. I wanted to see if I can get the date and time from my windows and display them on ubuntu.
I compiled the code and it gave no errors, but when I wrote ./Socket-1 it gave me this error: Connection Failed.

Could it be because I am running this program on a linux virtual machine?

Thanks 🙂

∞
ajesh October 28, 2012, 10:46 am

Thank you, it is a great article.. 🙂

∞
Farhad October 31, 2012, 10:14 pm

Hi guys…can we create a loop in our socket program where the client can continously query for data n server responds to each query,without closing the sockets?
where should the loop be?

and my second question is ,how can i send a trap signal from server to client in socket programming?

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biswa parida November 1, 2012, 1:11 am

i appreciate the comments

∞
Monstre November 10, 2012, 11:48 pm

You are a genius :D!!! I appreciate a lot this simply code working!!!

∞
Angela November 12, 2012, 1:15 pm

Thank you for the great article. I have a question: how can we let the server run forever and continuously send/receive data to/from the client? I.e., is there anyway to not close the socket? Something similar to serve_forever() in Python?

∞
Jurij November 20, 2012, 3:12 pm

Great tutorial. I have a question. What exactly means variables “sockfd”, “connfd”, “listenfd” and for what we use they. Thanks

∞
Heena December 24, 2012, 12:54 am

Nice tutorials !!! really helpful in learning socket prog….thanx

∞
Supriya Magdum January 9, 2013, 12:32 am

AWESOME SITE……

∞
charu January 10, 2013, 12:29 am

hey gr8 work ya….dats very helpful…thanku…

∞
Prashant January 10, 2013, 10:14 am

Hey can u give me exact sequence to run this program

∞
Vaibhav February 9, 2013, 3:51 pm

Best Tutorial on web to learn socket programming.

Thank you !

∞
Farhad February 11, 2013, 12:26 am

Situation:my client and server both sockets are open and connected.
Can i send an alarm/trap from server to client for a specific task without the client querying for anything?

Your help will be highly appreciated.!

∞
Suneel Kumar February 22, 2013, 12:27 pm

Thankyou very much .. I want to ask about “server performs some computational task on behalf of Clients and response to him ” like as example client send two integers to server and server add those number and output response to server.. How I can send Integers, command string.. etc in which way on server as well as client.
Please reply

∞
sreelakshmi March 25, 2013, 3:02 am

sockt.c: line 12: syntax error near unexpected token `(‘
sockt.c: line 12: `int main(int argc, char *argv[])’
there is an error like what can i do?

∞
Yash Rohilla April 1, 2013, 9:59 am

Great article Himanshu! The explanations beneath the programs really helped me understand the concept of socket progamming. I’m still getting an issue though. I’ve been trying to run the server and client on the same machine, so I’ve been using the loopback address. However, I keep getting a connect failed output. Any ideas?

∞
Farhad April 3, 2013, 4:04 am

Hi friends..
I did a Server/client model using socket programming.

I am having some trouble in my server side program
I am having an infinte while loop on server side and I am checking few conditions on server side.
If the conditions satisfy then the while loop goes on doing its work in each iteration ,however if any condition fails then the client side program ends but at server side it shows an infinte loop running without any exit.

I am trying to give
close(accept_sd);
close(listen_sd);
break;
commands for false conditions too,but the loop keeps on going infinitely .

Kindly help..!
Thank You

∞
RICHA April 16, 2013, 12:35 am

how to implement quiz between client and server using socket?

∞
umair August 7, 2013, 10:15 am

plz help me how can i send Hi(sent) to server side and Hi(received) to client side using this code?

∞
Rajesh September 10, 2013, 10:38 am

Thank you !!!

Nice Article…

please change this : memset(recvBuff, ‘0’,sizeof(recvBuff));
with : memset(recvBuff, ”,sizeof(recvBuff)); or memset(recvBuff, 0,sizeof(recvBuff));

∞
lsatenstein September 15, 2013, 6:55 am

Definitely not the memset with “” as 2nd argument. with “” as 2nd argument, you would be telling memset to use the address of “”

Perhaps the 2nd argument should be. *””. (The contents of the null string)

∞
kaushik September 16, 2013, 4:39 am

Kindly use comments for better understandablity……..ammendments will be appreciated
thank u

∞
Nikhil September 27, 2013, 2:19 am

Hi I tried running ur code with the following changes in the while loop

while(1)
{
connfd = accept(listenfd, (struct sockaddr*)NULL, NULL);

// ticks = time(NULL);
snprintf(sendBuff, sizeof(sendBuff), “******************so m here !!@!@”);
write(connfd, sendBuff, strlen(sendBuff));

For the first time this code runs fine .. and then I shutdown the server..
But now when i try to run the client with the server ip it still gives me the same output ..

can u guess where is it going wrong ??

∞
Diwakar October 9, 2013, 1:13 pm

Hi,
Can you provide any examples of socket programming codes from real world i.e. industry? Like how its used in industry preferably in hardware interaction paradigm e.g in relation to network equipments like DSLAM/ONT?

∞
archana October 16, 2013, 7:01 am

Hi,
I am doing c programming with unix…I have copied ur code and trying to run on same machine….then I am getting error like “Connect Failed”..so how can we resolve this?

∞
Joris Achten January 3, 2014, 2:54 am

Nice one!

∞
Leslie Satenstein January 4, 2014, 8:42 pm

In the above examples
memset(recvBuff, ‘0’,sizeof(recvBuff));
puts a load of zeros into the string.

The following corrections may be made as

memset(recvBuff, 0,sizeof(recvBuff));
or
memset(recvBuff, (char) 0,sizeof(recvBuff));

or
memset(recvBuff, ”,sizeof(recvBuff)); // a \ followed by a 0

∞
Leslie Satenstein January 4, 2014, 8:45 pm

the sequence ‘ followed by \ followed by 0 folloed by ? yields the same as

does not display properly so ue the following

(char) 0

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bonzz January 21, 2014, 12:12 am

What if we have to give some message instead of time..

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aniket January 29, 2014, 5:01 am

nice ,
it helps me in my colg work
thnks,….

∞
BhanuPriya.s February 17, 2014, 2:49 am

thanks.I really appreciate …
thankyou..

∞
Tamilselvi February 17, 2014, 2:51 am

very nice coding.thank u…….

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Said March 30, 2014, 9:43 am

Plz Can U send Me The AF_UNIX ,SOCK-DGRAM Code 🙂

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nikita April 9, 2014, 2:59 pm

can please send me the code using send and recv calls instead of read and write?
i have run both the codes for server as well as for client….bt the server code never gets quit even if i enter the choice for quit….so suggest me in this
thank you..!!!!

∞
Leslie Satenstein April 10, 2014, 8:31 am

Hi Nikita

Please type man socket or info socket. Google socket programming.
When you quit a program you should of course do first do a close() call for the socket that was opened.

∞
Douglas April 18, 2014, 8:41 pm

You are not checking for errors, I lost almost an hour because of an error on bind(). Permission denied. Please correct the code.

∞
giordano April 23, 2014, 9:44 am

hi,
I am doing a patch to a very old program running on sco unix 5.0.5 server.
i need a server that listen on tcp port from other hosts but after many tests
the wrong point is on accept call: the accept dont wait client connection but return with a 0 value and errno is set to “unknown error”.
sockets are blocking as default o no ? … or i must set flag to blocking beaviour?

∞
Sam April 25, 2014, 7:56 am

You say, “In the call to accept(), the server is put to sleep and when for an incoming client request, …” Instead of “and when” did you mean “waiting”?

∞
fra May 16, 2014, 1:24 pm

Hey.

Thanks for the code snippet! Very helpful.
Questions: Can I connect over any port that I like? I have some data acquisition equipment that puts out data at a given IP over port 55555. I have tried compiling and running with different ports and I connection failures.

Thanks!

∞
n.a.s May 18, 2014, 6:04 pm

Hi,
How I can pass array to server over UDP?

Thanks

∞
Azam May 29, 2014, 8:36 pm

Hi,I wanna show CPU usage,memory usage,filesystem read & write in sockt programing with C in Ubuntu.
please help me
thanks in advance

∞
iliya June 15, 2014, 3:15 pm

hi,
good one . The example is very simple and also understandable but there is a problem same as “archana” mentioned . i’ve got the problem exactly the same . how can i fix the problem ? (Error : Connect Failed )

Thanks alot.

∞
Andy July 9, 2014, 12:08 am

This a late comment, but you deserve big kudos for this program set and explanation. This is of great benefit to my offensive security training. I need to understand the inner workings of exploits and payloads, which contain socket-related activity. This is perfect for my current studies.

∞
padmanagarajan July 9, 2014, 12:24 am

Quite easy to understand.. thanks a lot…

∞
Pragya Daga September 2, 2014, 12:01 pm

I’m new to using linux and socket
can you please tell me what does /newsc 127.0.0.1 do?
it shows no directory present

∞
sai October 24, 2014, 12:57 am

Hi,
I am trying to create a client server program . The server and Client in my scenario doesnt rest in the same system they are present in a distributed LAN network. Now I want to create a Server which has a global IP Address ( I assume it to be the IP address of the system in which it is running). The Client needs to interact with this Server by actually typing the IP address of the Lan System where the Server Program is running. Every time I am trying to bind the server program with the systems ip address instead of the INADDR_ANY the binding simply fails everytime.
Please let me know how I can bind a socket with a global IP address which i can access from an external client.

Thanks in advance.

∞
Brad November 13, 2014, 7:58 am

Great Article for the basis of understanding “basic” socket programming in c, would not recommend using this code, I did come across some issues that makes the code unusable for anything else besides this demonstration.

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Sam November 13, 2014, 11:59 am

@Brad – could you elaborate on “some issues”?

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Aayush November 14, 2014, 7:57 am

thank you sir for providing the code but this code of server is compiled easily but there is a problem i am facing during run time i.e.-a error come due to the parameters in main function…
Please provide me the solution of that

∞
Narendra Bade November 14, 2014, 7:44 pm

I saved above given server and client program into s1.c and c1.c respectively.
I have compiled both program and then ran client program as ./c1 127.0.0.1 and I am getting error in connect. I don’t know what is the reason. I think I am missing something.
Can you please guide me on this ?

∞
achoora December 3, 2014, 6:04 am

Thanks a lot ,very precise.

∞
sarafire March 1, 2015, 10:57 pm

thank you sir……………………!!!

∞
PSDK March 11, 2015, 12:32 am

Hi,Thank you for helps and good articles. Can you propose a good ebook for full socket programming??
Regards.

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PSDK March 16, 2015, 12:31 am

Hi, AMQP protocol and some implementation like RabbitMQ can replaced with Socket?

∞
Vijay May 21, 2015, 9:04 am

Hi all,

Can anybody write a server client based program in C that always update the client ipv6 addr to the server.

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mina January 8, 2016, 9:03 am

Hi
Please help me! 🙁
I run This code , but Date+Time is wrong!!

Date + time is always unchanged.
Date+ Time : wen 31 des 16:0:0 1969 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

∞
ravikumar March 17, 2016, 11:28 pm

this artice is very useful for client and server mode application.but i want in depth of client and server mode
communication.

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MD IRFAN April 25, 2016, 1:05 am

sir, i want a client and server program in linux for adding two numbers. so plz mail me tha program on this mail id.

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Vadiraj Purohit December 22, 2016, 1:50 pm

socks.c – server
sockc.c – client

Compile this way
gcc socks.c -osocks
gcc sockc.c -sockc

This creates executables namely socks and sockc.
Run server first on one terminal by executing ./socks
Then run the client on another terminal with ./sockc 127.0.0.1

∞

manish December 30, 2016, 3:43 am

hi i want to write code for fetching the ip address of client side send send that ip address to client side how can i do please help

#include     // for input output function
#include    //strlen
#include    //strlen
#include // for soket creation
#include //inet_addr
#include    //write
 
#include //for threading , link with lpthread
 
void *connection_handler(void *);
 
int main(int argc , char *argv[])
{
    int socket_desc , new_socket , c , *new_sock;
    struct sockaddr_in server , client;
    char *message;
     
    //Create socket
    socket_desc = socket(AF_INET , SOCK_STREAM , 0);
    if (socket_desc == -1)
    {
        printf("Could not create socket");
    }
     
    //Prepare the sockaddr_in structure
    server.sin_family = AF_INET;
    server.sin_addr.s_addr = INADDR_ANY;
    server.sin_port = htons( 8888 );
     char *client_ip = inet_ntoa(client.sin_addr);
     int client_port = ntohs(client.sin_port);        
    //Bind
    if( bind(socket_desc,(struct sockaddr *)&server , sizeof(server)) < 0)
    {
        puts("bind failed");
        return 1;
    }
    puts("bind done");
     
    //Listen
    listen(socket_desc , 3);
     
    //Accept and incoming connection
    puts("Waiting for incoming connections...");
    c = sizeof(struct sockaddr_in);
    while( (new_socket = accept(socket_desc, (struct sockaddr *)&client, (socklen_t*)&c)) )
    {
        puts("Connection accepted");
        printf("IP address is: %s\n", inet_ntoa(client.sin_addr));
        printf("port is: %d\n", (int) ntohs(client.sin_port));
         
        //Reply to the client
        message = "Hello Client , I have received your connection. And now I will assign a handler for you\n";
        write(new_socket , message , strlen(message));
         
        pthread_t sniffer_thread;
        new_sock = malloc(1);
        *new_sock = new_socket;
         
        if( pthread_create( &sniffer_thread , NULL ,  connection_handler , (void*) new_sock) < 0)
        {
            perror("could not create thread");
            return 1;
        }
         
        //Now join the thread , so that we dont terminate before the thread
        //pthread_join( sniffer_thread , NULL);
        puts("Handler assigned");
    }
     
    if (new_socket 0 )
    {
        //Send the message back to client
        write(sock , client_message , strlen(client_message));
    }
     
    if(read_size == 0)
    {
        puts("Client disconnected");
        fflush(stdout);
    }
    else if(read_size == -1)
    {
        perror("recv failed");
    }
         
    //Free the socket pointer
    free(socket_desc);
     return 0;
 }

∞

Shankar January 9, 2017, 4:27 am

Very nice piece of work. Thank you much.

∞
saravana February 16, 2017, 3:53 am

i want server program using sockets(tcp connection) for multiple client for a windows. Someone please give a solution or idea

∞
Ilham March 12, 2019, 10:01 pm

Brother, This was awesome. I were searching this thing for about 3 weeks to my assignment. But I didnt got a correct method that can communicate with 2 machines. But you had done my work. Thanks for ur work… The best article of the world will be this to me.. I cant tell my expressions through this cmment. its very much very awesome to get this article to see. and i need the UDP SYSTEM also..

∞

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