CS 574 HW1

The World's Most Useless Daemon

Due Monday, September 23

For this assignment, I want you to create the world's most useless daemon. Here's what it does: you pass it a string, which is a 32-bit integer expressed in standard C notation (so the number is decimal unless it starts with a 0 (in which case it's octal), unless it starts with 0x (in which case it's hexadecimal)). The server responds with the 32-bit binary equivalent, in standard network byte order.

In a bit more detail, the server must:

1. Create a TCP socket, and bind it to port 8765
2. Sit and wait for connections
3. When a process connects to it, fork a child to manage the connection, and sit and wait for more connections.
4. Meanwhile, the child sits and communicates with the client process. The client process sends it integers in C's standard format, separated by spaces. Whenever the child receives a value, it converts it to binary, converts the binary to network byte order, and sends it back.

A few notes:

1. It must run under Linux. I mean it. If you don't know what OS your customary workstation runs, find out.
2. Pay attention to the coding standards
3. Write a reasonably efficient program. Don't, for example, read the input one byte at a time.