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A '''Unix ___domain socket''' or '''IPC socket''' (inter-process communication socket) is a data communications endpoint that is similar to an [[internet socket]], but does not use a network protocol for communication. It is used in [[POSIX]] [[operating system]]s for [[inter-process communication]].
Unix ___domain connections appear as [[byte stream]]s or [[datagram]] sequences, much like network connections, but all data remains within the local computer. UNIX ___domain sockets use the file system as address name space; i.e. they are referenced by processes as [[inodes]] in the file system. This allows two distinct processes to open the same socket in order to communicate. However, the actual communication (the data exchange) does not use the file system, but buffers in kernel memory.
In addition to sending data, processes can send [[file descriptor]]s across a Unix ___domain socket connection (including file descriptors for ___domain sockets) using the sendmsg() and recvmsg() system calls. This means that ___domain sockets can be used as an [[object-capability model|object-capability]] communication system.
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