Purpose of sendto address for C raw socket?

Writing to the socket with send fails, telling me I need to specify an address.

It fails, because the send() function can only be used on connected sockets (as stated here). Usually you would use send() for TCP communication (connection-oriented) and sendto() can be used to send UDP datagrams (connectionless).

Since you want to send "ping" packets, or more correctly ICMP datagrams, which are clearly connectionless, you have to use the sendto() function.

It seems none of the extra fields in sendto are actually used to great extent. So, is there a technical reason why I have to use sendto instead of send or is it just an oversight in the API?

Short answer:

When you are not allowed to use send(), then there is only one option left, called sendto().

Long answer:

It is not just an oversight in the API. If you want to send a UDP datagram by using an ordinary socket (e.g. SOCK_DGRAM), sendto() needs the information about the destination address and port, which you provided in the struct sockaddr_in, right? The kernel will insert that information into the resulting IP header, since the struct sockaddr_in is the only place where you specified who the receiver will be. Or in other words: in this case the kernel has to take the destination info from your struct as you don't provide an additional IP header.

Because sendto() is not only used for UDP but also raw sockets, it has to be a more or less "generic" function which can cover all the different use cases, even when some parameters like the port number are not relevant/used in the end.

For instance, by using IPPROTO_RAW (which automatically implies IP_HDRINCL), you show your intention that you want to create the IP header on your own. Thus the last two arguments of sendto() are actually redundant information, because they're already included in the data buffer you pass to sendto() as the second argument. Note that, even when you use IP_HDRINCL with your raw socket, the kernel will fill in the source address and checksum of your IP datagram if you set the corresponding fields to 0.

If you want to write your own ping program, you could also change the last argument in your socket() function from IPPROTO_RAW to IPPROTO_ICMP and let the kernel create the IP header for you, so you have one thing less to worry about. Now you can easily see how the two sendto()-parameters *dest_addr and addrlen become significant again because it's the only place where you provide a destination address.

The language and APIs are very old and have grown over time. Some APIs can look weird from todays perspective but you can't change the old interfaces without breaking a huge amount of existing code. Sometimes you just have to get used to things that were defined/designed many years or decades ago.

Hope that answers your question.

The send() call is used when the sockets are in a TCP SOCK_STREAM connected state.

From the man page:

the send() call may be used only when the socket is in a connected state (so that the intended recipient is known).

Since your application obviously does not connect with any other socket, we cannot expect send() to work.