LISTEN(2) System Calls Manual LISTEN(2)

listen — listen for connections on a socket

Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

#include <sys/socket.h>

int
listen(int s, int backlog);

To accept connections, a socket is first created with socket(2), a willingness to accept incoming connections and a queue limit for incoming connections are specified with (), and then the connections are accepted with accept(2). The listen() call applies only to sockets of type SOCK_STREAM or SOCK_SEQPACKET.

The 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.

A 0 return value indicates success; -1 indicates an error.

listen() will fail if:

[]
The argument s is not a valid descriptor.
[]
The argument s is not a socket.
[]
The socket is not of a type that supports the operation listen().

accept(2), connect(2), socket(2)

The listen() function call appeared in 4.2BSD.

The backlog is currently limited (silently) to 128.

December 11, 1993 NetBSD 11.0