What is the difference between a port and a socket?

Question

This was a question raised by one of the software engineers in my organisation. I\'m interested in the broadest definition.

Answer 1

Socket is SW abstraction of networking endpoint, used as the interface to the application. In Java, C# it is represented by object, in Linux, Unix it is a file.

Port is just a property of a socket you have specify if you want to establish a communication. To receieve packet from a socket you have to bind it to specific local port and NIC (with local IP address) or all NICs (INADDR_ANY is specified in the bind call). To send packet, you have to specify port and IP of the remote socket.