What is sa_family_t

Question

I'm following Beej's Guide to Network Programming, and I'm using VC++ 2010, but when I copy paste the structs into my program, some of the types come up as incorrect identifiers. For example:

u_int32_t came up as that, and after some searching I found out those are old types from the C language circa 1999. I could have just included stdint.h, but that would require me to remember what they meant. Instead I used the standard int, which is 32 bits long (4 bytes), and for the other ones which are 64 bits long (8 bytes), I used long long int.

Anyways, I'm narrowing down to my last syntax error and it says sa_family_t is an invalid indentifier. I don't have a clue what its supposed to be and searching has turned up nothing. That's my problem, I don't know what I should specify for a type identifier for that.

Another thing that's bothering me is this: char __ss_pad1[_SS_PAD1SIZE]; The SS_PAD1SIZE thing comes up in red as invalid too.

Answer 1

sa_family_t should be an unsigned integer. The Windows header files don't conform to that standard. Winsock.h defines the sockaddr struct as follows:

struct sockaddr {
        u_short sa_family;              /* address family */
        char    sa_data[14];            /* up to 14 bytes of direct address */
};

So to compile your code you're going to need to typedef sa_family_t yourself.