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Asked: 2026-05-30T04:25:52+00:00

As far as I have observed,both libs consist of over 90% same exact codes.

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As far as I have observed,both libs consist of over 90% same exact codes.
When I declare them in my example programs,no magic happens.
I don’t really understand the difference of those libs even though they are located in seperated directories.Can someone break it down for me?

Plus:
I tried declaring linux/in.h above sys/socket.h ,the complier buzzed like “cannot find specified-qualified-list for sa_family_t”,which means sa_family_t is not defined in the scope of linux/in.h,if called in this manner…

Then I tried same thing for netinet/in.h,well,it works regardless of places the declaration are.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The linux/*.h headers were really meant for internal kernel use and if Linux were being created today, these files would not even exist under /usr/include. But early on, a lot of the userspace libc (libc4 and libc5 at the time) relied on Linux headers to define types, constants, structures, etc. for use in userspace, so netinet/in.h contained just #include <linux/in.h> or similar, and the lovely tradition got started. Today the only headers in the linux tree that should be used for userspace apps are some things related to supporting specific hardware at a low level, like the Linux console, framebuffer, video4linux, etc.

    In short, you should use netinet/in.h (the standard header specified by POSIX) and pretend you never saw linux/in.h. 🙂

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