Opening Multiple TCP Connections From A Client To A Server Using Random Source Port In C

Question

I am writing a C program where for every new request to be processed by server, I need to open a new TCP connection? That is every request from client needs to be handled by a separate TCP connection to a server listening on a particular port.

Can someone help me in code pointers?

• How to maintain array of this socket identifiers (multiple sockets that needs to be opened)
• How will I be able to read (Need to scroll through all open sockets and see if something interesting is to be read upon that socket)

Any code snippet will be highly useful?

Answer 1

If you need to save state with the socket, put it in a struct together with the data you need, and link the structures together as a list. For checking which sockets are ready see Maluchi's answer.

Answer 2

You can use the select() function (assuming you are working with <sys/socket.h>), "gives you the power to monitor several sockets at the same time. It'll tell you which ones are ready for reading, which are ready for writing, and which sockets have raised exceptions" from http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/ (here you can download a pretty good book on network programming basics).

For a server example using select check http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/examples/selectserver.c

Hope it helps