Question

Now this is a bit more of a request since I am not able to find
any simple and direct example for this.

Issue: I want to send a file from the server side to the client side.

When the server is already up and listening on a port and the client requests a file (file’s name being accepted as a parameter with the server IP address such as 127.0.0.1 and port no.)
and then the process of transfer starts till the file is copied.

Also can someone incorporate how can i measure the average transfer speed on the server side?

BTW: I am running Linux x86
Cheers,
echo9

Answer 1

Check Beej’s Guide to Network Programming. There are lots of examples there that shows how to implement a client/server architecture using sockets and send data between them.

EDIT:

Check items 8 and 9 from this tutorial for a complete example on client/server. Note that on item 8, the server sends a char* to the client:

send(fd2,"Welcome to my server.\n",22,0); /* send to the client welcome message */

On this case, it’s the "Welcome to my server.\n" string, and the next parameter is the size of the string you want to send.

When you need to send data from a file it’s the same thing: first, you need to read the data from the file and store it in a char* buffer; that you manually allocated through malloc().

Something like this:

char* buffer;
buffer = (char*) malloc(1024); // let's say your file has 1KB of data

/* insert here the code to read data from the file and populate buffer with it */

send(fd2, buffer, 1024,0);