IOCTL(2)

NAME
ioctl - control device

SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/ioctl.h>
int
ioctl(int d, unsigned long request, ...);

DESCRIPTION
The ioctl() function manipulates the underlying device parameters of special files. In particular, many operating characteristics of character special files (e.g. terminals) may be controlled with ioctl() requests. The argument d must be an open file descriptor.

The third argument to ioctl is traditionally named char *argp. Most uses of ioctl in FreeBSD 3.0 however, require the third argument to be a caddr_t or an int.

An ioctl request has encoded in it whether the argument is an “in” parameter or “out” parameter, and the size of the argument argp in bytes. Macros and defines used in specifying an ioctl request are located in the file <sys/ioctl.h>.

IMPLEMENTATION NOTES

In the non-threaded library ioctl() is implemented as the ioctl syscall.

In the threaded library, the ioctl syscall is assembled to _thread_sys_ioctl() and ioctl() is implemented as a function which locks d for read and write, then calls _thread_sys_ioctl(). Before returning, ioctl() unlocks d.

RETURN VALUES
If an error has occurred, a value of -1 is returned and errno is set to indicate the error.

ERRORS
Ioctl() will fail if:

[EBADF]
    d is not a valid descriptor.

[ENOTTY]
    d is not associated with a character special device.

[ENOTTY]
    The specified request does not apply to the kind of object that the descriptor d references.

[EINVAL]
    Request or argp is not valid.

SEE ALSO
mt(1), execve(2), fcntl(2), intro(4), tty(4)

HISTORY
An ioctl() function call appeared in AT&T UNIX.