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Manual Reference Pages  - SOCKETPAIR (2)

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socketpair - create a pair of connected sockets

CONTENTS

Synopsis
Description
Errors
Notes

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/socket.h>

int socketpair(int d, int type, int protocol, int sv[2]);

The socketpair call creates an unnamed pair of connected sockets in the specified domain d, of the specified type, and using the optionally specified protocol. The descriptors used in referencing the new sockets are returned in sv[0] and sv[1]. The two sockets are indistinguishable.

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

EMFILE	Too many descriptors are in use by this process.
EAFNOSUPPORT
	The specified address family is not supported on this machine.
EPROTONOSUPPORT
	The specified protocol is not supported on this machine.
EOPNOTSUPP
	The specified protocol does not support creation of socket pairs.
EFAULT	The address sv does not specify a valid part of the process address space.

4.4BSD, SUSv2, POSIX 1003.1-2001. The socketpair function call appeared in 4.2BSD. It is generally portable to/from non-BSD systems supporting clones of the BSD socket layer (including System V variants).

On Linux, the only supported domain for this call is AF_UNIX (or synonymously, AF_LOCAL). (Most implementations have the same restriction.)

read(2), write(2), pipe(2), socket(2), unix(7)

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