.\" Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California. .\" All rights reserved. .\" .\" Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted .\" provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are .\" duplicated in all such forms and that any documentation, .\" advertising materials, and other materials related to such .\" distribution and use acknowledge that the software was developed .\" by the University of California, Berkeley. The name of the .\" University may not be used to endorse or promote products derived .\" from this software without specific prior written permission. .\" THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'' AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR .\" IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED .\" WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. .\" .\" @(#)listen.2 6.3 (Berkeley) 02/14/89 .\" .TH LISTEN 2 "" .UC 5 .SH NAME listen \- listen for connections on a socket .SH SYNOPSIS .nf .ft B listen(s, backlog) int s, backlog; .fi .SH DESCRIPTION To accept connections, a socket is first created with .IR socket (2), a willingness to accept incoming connections and a queue limit for incoming connections are specified with .IR listen (2), and then the connections are accepted with .IR accept (2). The .I listen call applies only to sockets of type SOCK_STREAM or SOCK_SEQPACKET. .PP The .I 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. .SH "RETURN VALUE A 0 return value indicates success; \-1 indicates an error. .SH "ERRORS The call fails if: .TP 20 [EBADF] The argument \fIs\fP is not a valid descriptor. .TP 20 [ENOTSOCK] The argument \fIs\fP is not a socket. .TP 20 [EOPNOTSUPP] The socket is not of a type that supports the operation \fIlisten\fP. .SH "SEE ALSO" accept(2), connect(2), socket(2) .SH BUGS The .I backlog is currently limited (silently) to 5.