SOCKATMARK

Section: POSIX Programmer's Manual (3P)
Updated: 2003
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PROLOG

This manual page is part of the POSIX Programmer's Manual. The Linux implementation of this interface may differ (consult the corresponding Linux manual page for details of Linux behavior), or the interface may not be implemented on Linux.  

NAME

sockatmark - determine whether a socket is at the out-of-band mark  

SYNOPSIS

#include <sys/socket.h>

int sockatmark(int s);
 

DESCRIPTION

The sockatmark() function shall determine whether the socket specified by the descriptor s is at the out-of-band data mark (see the System Interfaces volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001, Section 2.10.12, Socket Out-of-Band State). If the protocol for the socket supports out-of-band data by marking the stream with an out-of-band data mark, the sockatmark() function shall return 1 when all data preceding the mark has been read and the out-of-band data mark is the first element in the receive queue. The sockatmark() function shall not remove the mark from the stream.  

RETURN VALUE

Upon successful completion, the sockatmark() function shall return a value indicating whether the socket is at an out-of-band data mark. If the protocol has marked the data stream and all data preceding the mark has been read, the return value shall be 1; if there is no mark, or if data precedes the mark in the receive queue, the sockatmark() function shall return 0. Otherwise, it shall return a value of -1 and set errno to indicate the error.  

ERRORS

The sockatmark() function shall fail if:

EBADF
The s argument is not a valid file descriptor.
ENOTTY
The s argument does not specify a descriptor for a socket.

The following sections are informative.  

EXAMPLES

None.  

APPLICATION USAGE

The use of this function between receive operations allows an application to determine which received data precedes the out-of-band data and which follows the out-of-band data.

There is an inherent race condition in the use of this function. On an empty receive queue, the current read of the location might well be at the "mark", but the system has no way of knowing that the next data segment that will arrive from the network will carry the mark, and sockatmark() will return false, and the next read operation will silently consume the mark.

Hence, this function can only be used reliably when the application already knows that the out-of-band data has been seen by the system or that it is known that there is data waiting to be read at the socket (via SIGURG or select()). See Socket Receive Queue, Socket Out-of-Band Data State, Signals, and pselect() for details.  

RATIONALE

The sockatmark() function replaces the historical SIOCATMARK command to ioctl() which implemented the same functionality on many implementations. Using a wrapper function follows the adopted conventions to avoid specifying commands to the ioctl() function, other than those now included to support XSI STREAMS. The sockatmark() function could be implemented as follows: 


#include <sys/ioctl.h>


int sockatmark(int s)
{
    int val;
    if (ioctl(s,SIOCATMARK,&val)==-1)
        return(-1);
    return(val);
}

The use of [ENOTTY] to indicate an incorrect descriptor type matches the historical behavior of SIOCATMARK.  

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

None.  

SEE ALSO

pselect(), recv(), recvmsg(), the Base Definitions volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001, <sys/socket.h>  

COPYRIGHT

Portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic form from IEEE Std 1003.1, 2003 Edition, Standard for Information Technology -- Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6, Copyright (C) 2001-2003 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc and The Open Group. In the event of any discrepancy between this version and the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard, the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard is the referee document. The original Standard can be obtained online at http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html .