Stdio over sockets

[Arthur B. Smith]

Hi!

    We are trying to do stream i/o (stdio.h stuff) over stream type
sockets in the internet address family (instead of the more
conventional (normal or character special) files or pipes), in Ultrix
3.0, and are having some problems.  We have not tried this under any
other operating systems.    

    We are constructing the FILE * stream by calling fdopen on the
socket descriptor.  The Ultrix documentation says that fdopen can be
applied to descriptors obtained from open, dup, creat or pipe.
Sockets are not mentioned as being either allowed or disallowed.
Fdopen returns non-NULL, so it presumably is succeeding, but
subsequent fprintf's seem to be failing.

    Does anyone know for sure if we can or can't do what we are trying
to do?  Since stream type sockets support the read, write and close
system calls, one would expect most operations to work.  Sockets DO
return errors to fstat calls, though, so any operation that insists on
checking the descriptor's status could fail.  

    Any help will be greatly appreciated.  Please respond by e-mail,
and I fill forward responses to any who request them.  I will post a
summary if the need seems to demand it.  Thanks in advance!

    	    -art smith (art at dinorah.wustl.edu    or
    	    	    	...!uunet!wucs1!dinorah!art)