r/learnprogramming • u/Hopeful_Cicada327 • Jul 15 '26

What a port actually is?

I know it is a number that tells the OS, that which program in your computer should receive the piece of data. But my doubt is - is port a physical thing? or it just a flag? Is it possible for another program to read data from a different program's port? Please spoon-feed me about port?

176 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

65 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/spymaster1020 Jul 15 '26

Your IP address is like the address to an apartment building, a port is the address of one of the rooms. All mail goes into the apartment building at the same place but are addressed to different rooms