Silver Moon’s approach will work but the best way would be to listen for socket connections asynchronously using epoll() and using TCP not UDP, UDP is unreliable so some of your commands might not make it to the server as intended. That’s what is done in most modern socket servers. Try googling how to use epoll() (Linux system call so should work on Raspberry Pi). It will allow you to have an efficient and scalable socket server. (I am actually almost done developing an IoT socket communication system myself using raspberry pi as main server and epoll() with TCP is the best approach for this kind of stuff as far as I know.

i haven’t done sockets for a long time. right now i can think of using multiple threads do things in parallel.
so the main thread could do its background work, and an extra thread could listen to the udp port for incoming messages.
or the other way round.
but i am not sure if that is the best approach. there might be better alternatives.

I’m a not a programmer but are very interested in electronics and making things automated. This was very helpful example of udp socket communications. What I did find though was the program doesn’t do anything else whilst it waits for data. How would you suggest to say send this server “Blink Led 1” and continue to listen for commands to turn on, blink or turn off leds.
I can for example blink the led no problem in one project, I can get you code also running on a pi and responding to commands I send it now but I would like to be able to continue doing things in the background.

Thanks for you time.

And ncat used option -vv which on my Ubuntu system means verbose. The captured text does not have the verbose output. My system had five lines of information for each line of typed in data.
Still, I am new to Linux and Ubuntu and this is an unexpected cool way to test the server app.
Thank you.

//keep listening for data
while(1)
{
printf(“Waiting for data…”);
fflush(stdout);
memset(buf,’\0′, BUFLEN); //Add this line

here &slen should be (socklen_t*)&slen . and work perfectly. Thank u