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(gawkinet.info)Basic Protocols

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The Basic Internet Protocols
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IP
     The Internet Protocol.  This protocol is almost never used
     directly by applications.  It provides the basic packet delivery
     and routing infrastructure of the Internet.  Much like the phone
     company's switching centers or the Post Office's trucks, it is not
     of much day-to-day interest to the regular user (or programmer).
     It happens to be a best effort datagram protocol.

UDP
     The User Datagram Protocol.  This is a best effort datagram
     protocol.  It provides a small amount of extra reliability over
     IP, and adds the notion of "ports", described in Note: TCP and UDP
     Ports.

TCP
     The Transmission Control Protocol.  This is a duplex, reliable,
     sequenced byte-stream protocol, again layered on top of IP, and
     also providing the notion of ports.  This is the protocol that you
     will most likely use when using `gawk' for network programming.

   All other user-level protocols use either TCP or UDP to do their
basic communications.  Examples are SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer
Protocol), FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and HTTP (HyperText Transfer
Protocol).