On localhost, how do I pick a free port number?

python sockets ipc port
Anton L. picture Anton L. · Sep 2, 2009 · Viewed 120.1k times · Source

I'm trying to play with inter-process communication and since I could not figure out how to use named pipes under Windows I thought I'll use network sockets. Everything happens locally. The server is able to launch slaves in a separate process and listens on some port. The slaves do their work and submit the result to the master. How do I figure out which port is available? I assume I cannot listen on port 80 or 21?

I'm using Python, if that cuts the choices down.

Answer

mark4o picture mark4o · Sep 2, 2009

Do not bind to a specific port. Instead, bind to port 0:

sock.bind(('', 0))

The OS will then pick an available port for you. You can get the port that was chosen using sock.getsockname()[1], and pass it on to the slaves so that they can connect back.

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