Once a socket has been connected to a peer, you can use the ordinary
read
and write
operations (see I/O Primitives) to
transfer data. A socket is a two-way communications channel, so read
and write operations can be performed at either end.
There are also some I/O modes that are specific to socket operations.
In order to specify these modes, you must use the recv
and
send
functions instead of the more generic read
and
write
functions. The recv
and send
functions take
an additional argument which you can use to specify various flags to
control special I/O modes. For example, you can specify the
MSG_OOB
flag to read or write out-of-band data, the
MSG_PEEK
flag to peek at input, or the MSG_DONTROUTE
flag
to control inclusion of routing information on output.