Can two applications listen to the same port?

Question

Can two applications on the same machine bind to the same port and IP address? Taking it a step further, can one app listen to requests coming from a certain IP and the othe

Answer 1

You can make two applications listen for the same port on the same network interface.

There can only be one listening socket for the specified network interface and port, but that socket can be shared between several applications.

If you have a listening socket in an application process and you fork that process, the socket will be inherited, so technically there will be now two processes listening the same port.