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

Upon successful completion, the value 0 is returned; otherwise the value -1 is returned and the global variable errno is set to indicate the 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

accept(2), connect(2), socket(2), sysctl(8)

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.