UDP: Message Passing

Here's a UDP program similar to the sample Internet TCP client given earlier. However, instead of checking one host at a time, the UDP version will check many of them asynchronously by simulating a multicast and then using select() to do a timed-out wait for I/O. To do something similar with TCP, you'd have to use a different socket handle for each host.

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
    use strict;
    require 5.002;
    use Socket;
    use Sys::Hostname;

    my ( $count, $hisiaddr, $hispaddr, $histime,
         $host, $iaddr, $paddr, $port, $proto,
         $rin, $rout, $rtime, $SECS_of_70_YEARS);

    $SECS_of_70_YEARS      = 2208988800;

    $iaddr = gethostbyname(hostname());
    $proto = getprotobyname('udp');
    $port = getservbyname('time', 'udp');
    $paddr = sockaddr_in(0, $iaddr); # 0 means let kernel pick

    socket(SOCKET, PF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, $proto)   || die "socket: $!";
    bind(SOCKET, $paddr)                          || die "bind: $!";

    $| = 1;
    printf "%-12s %8s %s\n",  "localhost", 0, scalar localtime time;
    $count = 0;
    for $host (@ARGV) {
        $count++;
        $hisiaddr = inet_aton($host)    || die "unknown host";
        $hispaddr = sockaddr_in($port, $hisiaddr);
        defined(send(SOCKET, 0, 0, $hispaddr))    || die "send $host: $!";
    }

    $rin = '';
    vec($rin, fileno(SOCKET), 1) = 1;

    # timeout after 10.0 seconds
    while ($count && select($rout = $rin, undef, undef, 10.0)) {
        $rtime = '';
        ($hispaddr = recv(SOCKET, $rtime, 4, 0))        || die "recv: $!";
        ($port, $hisiaddr) = sockaddr_in($hispaddr);
        $host = gethostbyaddr($hisiaddr, AF_INET);
        $histime = unpack("N", $rtime) - $SECS_of_70_YEARS ;
        printf "%-12s ", $host;
        printf "%8d %s\n", $histime - time, scalar localtime($histime);
        $count--;
    }