Winsock; Do I need to close a socket before reconnecting it?

Question

I'm using winsock and I open my sockets in the standard way (I handle errors correctly, but for the sake of this question I've made the code brief);

SOCKET sSocket = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TCP);

If I then connect it like so, it may lose connection occasionally.

connect(sSocket, reinterpret_cast<SOCKADDR*>(&sinAddr), sizeof(sinAddr));

When this happens, do I need to close and re-create the socket, or should I just re-call connect() ?

Answer 1

After a socket has been close() ed, it can not be used anymore.

Or the other way round: As long as close() has not been called on a socket, it can be (re-)used.

The call to socket() allocates a socket descriptor to the calling process. The socket descriptor exists and stays assigned to the process until close() is called.