What is the usage of sockaddr in C language?

sockaddr is a generic socket address structure used in network programming to represent the address information of a socket. It is used to store the socket’s address family, port number, IP address, and other related information.

In the C language, the sockaddr structure is typically used as a function parameter. For example, when calling the bind() function in socket programming, you need to pass a pointer to a sockaddr structure as an argument to specify the socket’s address information.

The sockaddr structure is defined as follows:

struct sockaddr {
    unsigned short sa_family; // 地址族
    char sa_data[14]; // 地址信息
};

In practical use, it is common to use derived structures from sockaddr, such as the sockaddr_in structure (for IPv4 socket addresses) or the sockaddr_in6 structure (for IPv6 socket addresses). Specific usage can be found in the corresponding network programming documentation or tutorials.