Performing IPC using Unix domain sockets

Unix domain sockets (UDS) are sometimes used as a convenient way to communicate between two processes. As in Unix, everything is conceptually a file. If you need an example of such an IPC action, this can be useful.

How to do it...

We launch a UDS server that binds to a filesystem path, and a UDS client uses the same path to communicate with the server.

Listing 3.9a shows a Unix domain socket server, as follows:

#!/usr/bin/env python 
# Python Network Programming Cookbook, Second Edition -- Chapter - 3 
# This program is optimized for Python 2.7.12 and Python 3.5.2. 
# It may run on any other version with/without modifications. 
 
 
import socket 
import os 
import time 
 
SERVER_PATH = "/tmp/python_unix_socket_server" 
  
def run_unix_domain_socket_server(): 
    if os.path.exists(SERVER_PATH): 
        os.remove( SERVER_PATH ) 
      
    print ("starting unix domain socket server.") 
    server = socket.socket( socket.AF_UNIX, socket.SOCK_DGRAM ) ...