DESCRIPTION

The accept() system call is used with connection-based socket types (SOCK_STREAM, SOCK_SEQPACKET). It extracts the first connection request on the queue of pending connections for the listening socket, sockfd, creates a new connected socket, and returns a new file descriptor referring to that socket. The newly created socket is not in the listening state. The original socket sockfd is unaffected by this call.

The argument sockfd is a socket that has been created with socket(2), bound to a local address with bind(2), and is listening for connections after a listen(2).

The argument addr is a pointer to a sockaddr structure. This structure is filled in with the address of the peer socket, as known to the communications layer. The exact format of the address returned addr is determined by the socket's address family (see socket(2) and the respective protocol man pages). When addr is NULL, nothing is filled in; in this case, addrlen is not used, and should also be NULL.

The addrlen argument is a value-result argument: the caller must initialize it to contain the size (in bytes) of the structure pointed to by addr; on return it will contain the actual size of the peer address.

The returned address is truncated if the buffer provided is too small; in this case, addrlen will return a value greater than was supplied to the call.

If no pending connections are present on the queue, and the socket is not marked as nonblocking, accept() blocks the caller until a connection is present. If the socket is marked nonblocking and no pending connections are present on the queue, accept() fails with the error EAGAIN or EWOULDBLOCK.

In order to be notified of incoming connections on a socket, you can use select(2) or poll(2). A readable event will be delivered when a new connection is attempted and you may then call accept() to get a socket for that connection. Alternatively, you can set the socket to deliver SIGIO when activity occurs on a socket; see socket(7) for details.

For certain protocols which require an explicit confirmation, such as DECNet, accept() can be thought of as merely dequeuing the next connection request and not implying confirmation. Confirmation can be implied by a normal read or write on the new file descriptor, and rejection can be implied by closing the new socket. Currently only DECNet has these semantics on Linux.

If flags is 0, then accept4() is the same as accept(). The following values can be bitwise ORed in flags to obtain different behavior:

RETURN VALUE

On success, these system calls return a nonnegative integer that is a descriptor for the accepted socket. On error, −1 is returned, and errno is set appropriately.

ERRORS

In addition, Linux accept() may fail if:

In addition, network errors for the new socket and as defined for the protocol may be returned. Various Linux kernels can return other errors such as ENOSR, ESOCKTNOSUPPORT, EPROTONOSUPPORT, ETIMEDOUT. The value ERESTARTSYS may be seen during a trace.

VERSIONS

The accept4() system call is available starting with Linux 2.6.28; support in glibc is available starting with version 2.10.

CONFORMING TO

accept(): POSIX.1-2001, SVr4, 4.4BSD, (accept() first appeared in 4.2BSD).

accept4() is a nonstandard Linux extension.

On Linux, the new socket returned by accept() does not inherit file status flags such as O_NONBLOCK and O_ASYNC from the listening socket. This behavior differs from the canonical BSD sockets implementation. Portable programs should not rely on inheritance or noninheritance of file status flags and always explicitly set all required flags on the socket returned from accept().

NOTES

POSIX.1-2001 does not require the inclusion of <sys/types.h> and this header file is not required on Linux. However, some historical (BSD) implementations required this header file, and portable applications are probably wise to include it.

There may not always be a connection waiting after a SIGIO is delivered or select(2) or poll(2) return a readability event because the connection might have been removed by an asynchronous network error or another thread before accept() is called. If this happens then the call will block waiting for the next connection to arrive. To ensure that accept() never blocks, the passed socket sockfd needs to have the O_NONBLOCK flag set (see socket(7)).

EXAMPLE

See bind(2).

SEE ALSO

bind(2), connect(2), listen(2), select(2), socket(2), socket(7)