Pipes, sockets and coms processes

[Robert Scott]

I'm trying to write a program to get a number of processes distributed
over a number of Sun SPARC stations to exchange information using sockets
over the ethernet.

My question is:

Given two processes communicating via a socket, how does the receiver know
the length of the senders message?  In the relevant manual on
interprocessor communication the examples given send fixed length
messages. I need to be able to send variable length messages where the
receiver won't know message length at compile time.

Any help with this, or any general advice on how to write such monsters
would be greatly appreciated.

Rob Scott
Department of AI		rbs at uk.ac.ed.aiai
University of Edinburgh
SCOTLAND