real world example of union in c

[manish sharma]

what can be the real world example of unions used in c

[Banfa]

The structure used to hold socket addresses (used on at least Windows and Linux)

struct   in_addr {
    union   {
        struct{
            unsigned  char   s_b1,
                             s_b2,
                             s_b3,
                             s_b4;
        }  S_un_b;
        struct  {
            unsigned  short  s_w1,
                             s_w2;
        }  S_un_w;
        unsigned long  S_addr;
    } S_un;
};
 
struct sockaddr_in{
    short            sin_family;
    unsigned short   sin_port;
    struct   in_addr sin_addr;
    char             sin_zero[8];
};