.\" Copyright (c) 1983 Regents of the University of California. .\" All rights reserved. The Berkeley software License Agreement .\" specifies the terms and conditions for redistribution. .\" .\" @(#)accept.2 6.3 (Berkeley) 5/22/86 .\" .TH ACCEPT 2 "May 22, 1986" .UC 5 .SH NAME accept \- accept a connection on a socket .SH SYNOPSIS .ft B .nf #include <sys/types.h> #include <sys/socket.h> .PP .ft B ns = accept(s, addr, addrlen) int ns, s; struct sockaddr *addr; int *addrlen; .fi .SH DESCRIPTION The argument .I s is a socket that has been created with .IR socket (2), bound to an address with .IR bind (2), and is listening for connections after a .IR listen (2). .I Accept extracts the first connection on the queue of pending connections, creates a new socket with the same properties of .I s and allocates a new file descriptor, .IR ns , for the socket. If no pending connections are present on the queue, and the socket is not marked as non-blocking, .I accept blocks the caller until a connection is present. If the socket is marked non-blocking and no pending connections are present on the queue, .I accept returns an error as described below. The accepted socket, .IR ns , may not be used to accept more connections. The original socket .I s remains open. .PP The argument .I addr is a result parameter that is filled in with the address of the connecting entity, as known to the communications layer. The exact format of the .I addr parameter is determined by the domain in which the communication is occurring. The .I addrlen is a value-result parameter; it should initially contain the amount of space pointed to by .IR addr ; on return it will contain the actual length (in bytes) of the address returned. This call is used with connection-based socket types, currently with SOCK_STREAM. .PP It is possible to .IR select (2) a socket for the purposes of doing an .I accept by selecting it for read. .SH "RETURN VALUE The call returns \-1 on error. If it succeeds, it returns a non-negative integer that is a descriptor for the accepted socket. .SH ERRORS The \fIaccept\fP will fail if: .TP 20 [EBADF] The descriptor is invalid. .TP 20 [ENOTSOCK] The descriptor references a file, not a socket. .TP 20 [EOPNOTSUPP] The referenced socket is not of type SOCK_STREAM. .TP 20 [EFAULT] The \fIaddr\fP parameter is not in a writable part of the user address space. .TP 20 [EWOULDBLOCK] The socket is marked non-blocking and no connections are present to be accepted. .SH SEE ALSO bind(2), connect(2), listen(2), select(2), socket(2)