Closing Sockets

A SOCK_STREAM socket can be discarded by a close() function call. If data is queued to a socket that promises reliable delivery after a close(), the protocol continues to try to transfer the data. If the data is still undelivered after an arbitrary period, it is discarded.

A shutdown() closes SOCK_STREAM sockets gracefully. Both processes can acknowledge that they are no longer sending. This call has the form:

shutdown(s, how);

Where how is defined as: