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Port (computing)

In computing, port has three meanings:

A hardware port is an outlet on a piece of equipment into which a plug or cable connects. For instance, a computer may have a keyboard port, into which the keyboard is connected.

A networking port, so named by analogy with the above, is a notational point for the connection of network programs. In TCP and UDP, multiple network services running on a single host are distinguished by port numbers; the operating system kernel uses these port numbers to sort out which packets should go to which programs. A program which is using a port, whether to await connections (i.e. to be a server) or to make connections, is said to have a socket[?] bound to that port -- more hardware analogy. A well known port is between the range 0-1023 which were traditionally assigned by IANA. Ephemeral ports are somewhere between 1024 to 65535 depending on the implementation of the TCP/IP stack of an operating system.

List of some well known network ports:

In programming, a port is a localization or translation of a piece of software to a particular API, operating system, or generally any other computing environment than that for which it was written. See porting for detail.



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