A Unix domain socket, also known as an IPC (inter-process communication) socket, is one way that different processes on the same system communicate with one another. Processes using one of these sockets employ communications protocols, not unlike communications that travel over the Internet. Sockets are addressed as inodes on the filesystem, and processes access the sockets as they would a file. The actual communication occurs entirely in the operating system kernel.
Operating system, Operating System terms, Socket, Unix
