This section describes the routines that you can use to locate and construct network addresses. Unless otherwise stated, interfaces presented in this section apply only to the Internet family.
Locating a service on a remote host requires many levels of mapping before the client and server communicate. A service has a name for human use. The service and host names must translate to network addresses. Finally, the network address must be usable to locate and route to the host. The specifics of the mappings can vary between network architectures.
Standard routines map host names to network addresses, network names to network numbers, protocol names to protocol numbers, and service names to port numbers. The standard routines also indicate the appropriate protocol to use in communicating with the server process. The file netdb.h must be included when using any of these routines.