LISTEN(2)

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 VALUE
On success, zero is returned. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set appropriately.

ERRORS

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.

HISTORY
The listen function call appeared in BSD 4.2.

BUGS
If the socket is of type af_inet, and the backlog argument is greater than 128 it is silently truncated to 128. For portable applications don't rely on this value since BSD (and at least some BSD derived systems) limit the backlog to 5.

SEE ALSO
accept(2), connect(2), socket(2)