Local Namespace Details (The GNU C Library)

#### 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)` ¶

  Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Safe | AC-Safe | See POSIX Safety Concepts.

  This macro computes the length of the socket address in the local namespace.