I am using bind and listen on a socket. Everything is going great,
but I realized today that my users can't turn off the server
without quitting. So at one point, I'd like to no longer listen on
that socket, and free up the port it's using for other
applications, while my application keeps running.
Do I use unlink to do that, or is there another way?
unlink() is used to remove a persistent name from a name space (e.g.,
unlink a name from a directory structure; doesn't necessarily remove
the file, but the name in question will be removed).
From what you say, I think the only thing to do is close(). The
accept() call that you use to get an incoming connection on a
listening port will give you a new socket descriptor, while the old
one is still associated with your listening socket.
If you don't want to accept any more incoming connection requests,
close()ing the socket descriptor is the right thing to do.
You will have to re-bind()/listen() when you want to accept new
connections, of course. You run the risk of someone having bound
that port while you weren't using it, but if that's OK, you should
have what you want.
Regards,
Justin
--
Justin C. Walker, Curmudgeon-At-Large
Institute for General Semantics
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Some people have a mental horizon of radius zero, and
call it their point of view.
-- David Hilbert
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