Create a socket connection

Usage

make.socket(host="localhost", port, fail=TRUE, server=FALSE)
close.socket(socket)

Arguments

host name of remote host
port port to connect to/listen on
fail failure to connect is an error?
server a server socket?

Description

With server=FALSE attempts to open a client socket to the specified port and host. With server=TRUE listens on the specified port for a connection and then returns a server socket. It is a good idea to use on.exit to ensure that a socket is closed, as you only get 64 of them.

Value

An object of class "socket".
socket socket number. This is for internal use
port port number of the connection
host name of remote computer

WARNING

I don't know if the connecting host name returned when server=TRUE can be trusted. I suspect not.

Author(s)

Thomas Lumley

References

Adapted from Luke Tierney's code for XLISP-Stat, in turn based on code from Robbins and Robbins "Practical UNIX Programming"

See Also

close.socket, read.socket

Examples

daytime <- function(host = "localhost"){
    a <- make.socket(host, 13)
    on.exit(close.socket(a))
    read.socket(a)
}
daytime()  ## only works if your computer runs this service
daytime("chime.cac.washington.edu")

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