Elementary UDP Sockets

UDP is a connectionless, unreliable, datagram protocol, quite unlike the connection-oriented, reliable byte stream provided by TCP.

#include <sys/socket.h>
ssize_t recvfrom(int sockfd, void *buff, size_t nbytes, int flags, struct sockaddr *from, socklen_t *addrlen);
ssize_t sendto(int sockfd, const void *buff, size_t nbytes, int flags, const struct sockaddr *to, socklen_t addrlen);
Both return: number of bytes read or written if OK, -1 on error

Writing a datagram of length 0 is acceptable. In the case of UDP, this results in an IP datagram containing an IP header (normally 20 bytes for IPv4 and 40 bytes for IPv6), an
8-byte UDP header, and no data. This also means that a return value of 0 from recvfrom is acceptable for a datagram protocol: It does not mean that the peer has closed the
connection, as does a return value of 0 from read on a TCP socket. Since UDP is connectionless, there is no such thing as closing a UDP connection.

If the from argument to recvfrom is a null pointer, then the corresponding length argument (addrlen) must also be a null pointer, and this indicates that we are not interested in knowing the protocol address of who sent us data.

Both recvfrom and sendto can be used with TCP, although there is normally no reason to do so.