8. Remote Procedure Calls

System V Release 4 includes a remote procedure call (RPC) interface derived from the one created and made popular by Sun Microsystems. Remote procedure calls are useful because they allow programmers to develop applications that ignore the details of communication but still make use of communication facilities. This chapter describes the RPC components and how programmers can use them to develop network-independent applications.

8.1. Introduction

Ordinary (local) procedure calls transfer the control flow of a program from one procedure to another within the same process on a single machine. Consider the following code fragment:

main(){     struct inargs inargs;     struct outargs outargs; ...

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