Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

IO::Socket::UNIX Reference

The IO::Socket::UNIX subclass creates a Unix-domain socket. Unix-domain sockets are local to the current host and are used internally to implement pipes, thus providing communication between unrelated processes. Using sockets provides finer control than using named pipes, also called FIFO (first-in, first-out) buffers. This is because receiving sockets can distinguish between different client connections, which can then be assigned to different sessions with the accept call.

The IO::Socket::UNIX constructor (new( )) creates the socket and returns an object containing a filehandle. The constructor can take the following options:

Type => SOCK_STREAM | SOCK_DGRAM

Indicates the type of socket: SOCK_STREAM for streaming, SOCK_DGRAM for packets or datagrams.

Local => pathname

Provides the pathname of the FIFO buffer to bind to the socket.

Peer => pathname

Provides the pathname to the destination FIFO buffer.

Listen => n

Creates a listen socket and sets the queue size to n.

The following methods can be used on an object created with IO::Socket::UNIX.