socket

   1. A general-purpose interprocess communication mechanism, originally developed in the Unix world. Sockets allow processes that are not running at the same time or on the same system to exchange information; pairs of cooperating sockets manage communications between the processes on your computer and those on a remote computer in a networked environment. You can read data from or write data to a socket just as you can to a file. Sockets are now used in many other environments.

   2. That part of an IPX (Internetwork Packet eXchange) internetwork node address that represents the destination of an IPX packet. Certain sockets are reserved by NetWare for particular applications. For example, IPX delivers all NetWare Core Protocol (NCP) request packets to socket 451h.

   See also mailslots; named pipe; pipe; semaphore; shared memory; WinSock.