Sockets are just like "worm holes" in science fiction. When things go into one end, they (should) come out of the other. Different kinds of sockets have different properties. Sockets are either connection-oriented or connectionless. Connection-oriented sockets allow for data to flow back and forth as needed, while connectionless sockets (also known as datagram sockets) allow only one message at a time to be transmitted, without an open connection. There are also different socket families. The two most common are AF_INET for internet connections, and AF_UNIX for unix IPC (interprocess communication). As stated earlier, this FAQ deals only with AF_INET sockets.

-- from UNIX Socket FAQ

I could explore further at this point, but this answers my question for the time being, especially since it appears that X is not using Unix sockets on my Mandrake 9.0 system, but PTS instead (so guess where I'm going now).

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See Resource Recommendations. Feel free to add additional resources to these lists, but please follow the guidelines on ResourceRecommendations including Guidelines_for_Rating_Resources.

Recommended

• (rhk) UNIX Socket FAQ; ; — aaparently recently moved, but I'm unclear on which is the correct permanent link
• (rhk) Unix Socket FAQ; ; — looks useful for a number of reasons -- might be good to post other questions as I work on the X Server Modification Project.
• (rhk) [[][]]; ; —

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• () RandyKramer - 11 Apr 2003
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