socketpair

See the current Perl documentation for socketpair.

Here is our local, out-dated (pre-5.6) version:

socketpair - create a pair of sockets

socketpair SOCKET1,SOCKET2,DOMAIN,TYPE,PROTOCOL

Creates an unnamed pair of sockets in the specified domain, of the specified type. DOMAIN, TYPE, and PROTOCOL are specified the same as for the system call of the same name. If unimplemented, yields a fatal error. Returns TRUE if successful.

Some systems defined pipe() in terms of socketpair(), in which a call to pipe(Rdr, Wtr) is essentially:

    use Socket;
    socketpair(Rdr, Wtr, AF_UNIX, SOCK_STREAM, PF_UNSPEC);
    shutdown(Rdr, 1);        # no more writing for reader
    shutdown(Wtr, 0);        # no more reading for writer

See the perlipc manpage for an example of socketpair use.