NAME
listen —
listen for connections on a
socket
SYNOPSIS
#include
<sys/socket.h>
int
listen(int
s, int
backlog);
DESCRIPTION
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
A 0 return value indicates success; -1 indicates an error.
ERRORS
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(). - [
EINVAL] - The socket is already connected.
SEE ALSO
STANDARDS
The listen() function conforms to
IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (“POSIX.1”).
HISTORY
The listen() system call first appeared in
4.1cBSD.
BUGS
The backlog is currently limited (silently) to the value of the kern.somaxconn sysctl, which defaults to 128.