NAME    [Toc]    [Back]

     listen - listen for connections on a socket

LIBRARY    [Toc]    [Back]

     Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS    [Toc]    [Back]

     #include <sys/socket.h>

     int
     listen(int s, int backlog);

DESCRIPTION    [Toc]    [Back]

     To accept connections, a socket is first created with socket(2), a willingness
 to accept incoming connections and a queue limit for incoming
     connections are specified with listen(), and then the connections are
     accepted with accept(2).  The listen() call applies only to sockets of
     type SOCK_STREAM or SOCK_SEQPACKET.

     The backlog parameter defines the maximum length the queue of pending
     connections may grow to.  If a connection request arrives with the queue
     full the client may receive an error with an indication of ECONNREFUSED,
     or, if the underlying protocol supports retransmission, the request may
     be ignored so that retries may succeed.

RETURN VALUES    [Toc]    [Back]

     A 0 return value indicates success; -1 indicates an error.

ERRORS    [Toc]    [Back]

     listen() will fail if:

     [EBADF]            The argument s is not a valid descriptor.

     [ENOTSOCK]         The argument s is not a socket.

     [EOPNOTSUPP]       The socket is not of a type that supports the operation
 listen().

SEE ALSO    [Toc]    [Back]

     accept(2), connect(2), socket(2)

HISTORY    [Toc]    [Back]

     The listen() function call appeared in 4.2BSD.

BUGS    [Toc]    [Back]

     The backlog is currently limited (silently) to 128.

BSD                            December 11, 1993                           BSD