Local Namespace Details - The GNU C Library

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#### 16.5.2 Details of Local Namespace

To create a socket in the local namespace, use the constant `PF_LOCAL` as the namespace argument to `socket` or `socketpair`. This constant is defined in `sys/socket.h`.

— Macro: int PF_LOCAL

> This designates the local namespace, in which socket addresses are local names, and its associated family of protocols. `PF_Local` is the macro used by Posix.1g.

— Macro: int PF_UNIX

> This is a synonym for `PF_LOCAL`, for compatibility's sake.

— Macro: int PF_FILE

> This is a synonym for `PF_LOCAL`, for compatibility's sake.

The structure for specifying socket names in the local namespace is defined in the header file `sys/un.h`:

— Data Type: struct sockaddr_un

> This structure is used to specify local namespace socket addresses. It has the following members:

> `short int sun_family`
>   This identifies the address family or format of the socket address. You should store the value `AF_LOCAL` to designate the local namespace. See Socket Addresses.
> `char sun_path[108]`
>   This is the file name to use.

>   Incomplete: Why is 108 a magic number? RMS suggests making this a zero-length array and tweaking the following example to use `alloca` to allocate an appropriate amount of storage based on the length of the filename.

You should compute the length parameter for a socket address in the local namespace as the sum of the size of the `sun_family` component and the string length (not the allocation size!) of the file name string. This can be done using the macro `SUN_LEN`:

— Macro: int SUN_LEN (struct sockaddr_un * ptr)

> The macro computes the length of socket address in the local namespace.