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Asked: 2026-06-11T21:17:10+00:00

Can someone explain what socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0) actually does when you bind it to

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Can someone explain what socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0) actually does when you bind it to an interface?

I have a socket like this listening on an interface, and, for example, if I do a http GET from my browser, when I do a read() on the socket, I literally see the buffer starts at the “GET /HTTP…” data that is the same data that shows up in the HTTP protocol packet of my wireshark capture of the same thing. How come I don’t see the TCP SYN, SYN/ACK, ACK packets as the start of the buffer?

I thought having this socket on an interface would show me literally everything, but it seems like it only shows the data, not the metadata around it.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It’s a SOCK_STREAM socket. It provides a byte-stream between two applications. You never see packets on a byte-stream socket, only a stream of bytes. That the stream of bytes takes place by an exchange of packets is an implementation detail that is made invisible to the application. (And might even be bypassed if both endpoints are on the same machine.)

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