NAME

listen − listen for connections on a socket

SYNOPSIS

listen(s, backlog)
int s, 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(2), 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 VALUE

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

ERRORS

The call fails 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

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

BUGS

The backlog is currently limited (silently) to 5. 

September 02, 1992