Respected people, I am Sreeram. I work on TCP/IP network applications. This mail is regarding UDP. Whenever a UDP datagram arrives, the receiver may wish to know the sender's IP address and also the destination address of that datagram. The recvfrom() function will return the sender's IP address. If the destination address of the datagram is required, then the user has to set the IP_PKTINFO socket option for the UDP socket and get the address as ancillary data in recvmsg(). So, the point here is that the user has to issue 2 reads on the same datagram (with the flag MSG_PEEK in first read call enabled) in order to obtain the sender's IP and the destination IP of the datagram. I personally feel that there should be a way provided to the user to obtain these values in a single read call. By doing this I am sure that lot of time would be saved in collecting the required information. I have written a simple UDP client program to show that we need 2 reads to obtain the above information. I have made it signal-driven just to make it interesting and not for any other reason. I have attached the client program along with this mail. Fortunately, as mentioned above, Linux provides the IP_PKTINFO socket option, enabling which, will send in a structure 'struct in_pktinfo' as ancillary data in recvmsg(). The structure is as follows: struct in_pktinfo { unsigned int ipi_ifindex; /* Interface index */ struct in_addr ipi_spec_dst; /* Local address */ struct in_addr ipi_addr; /* Header Destination address */ }; Would it be incorrect if I request the kernel coders to add the sender's IP address as well in this structure, so that the user will get both the sender's IP and the destination IP address of the datagram in a single call to recvmsg()? I very well understand that my knowledge is very much diminished. Hence I request you to kindly correct me if what I have understood/suggested is incorrect. Please suggest. Regards, Sreeram