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Name

send, sendto, sendmsg - send a message from a socket

Synopsis

cc [ flag ... ] file ... -lsocket -lnsl [ library ... ]


#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/socket.h>

int send(int s, const char *msg, int len, int flags);

int sendto(int s, const char *msg, int len, int flags, const struct sockaddr *to, int tolen);

int sendmsg(int s, const struct msghdr *msg, int flags);

MT-Level

Safe

Description

send(), sendto(), and sendmsg() are used to transmit a message to another transport end-point. send() may be used only when the socket is in a connected state, while sendto() and sendmsg() may be used at any time. s is a socket created with socket(3N) .

The address of the target is given by to with tolen specifying its size. The length of the message is given by len. If the message is too long to pass atomically through the underlying protocol, then the error EMSGSIZE is returned, and the message is not transmitted.

A return value of -1 indicates locally detected errors only. It does not implicitly mean the message was not delivered.

If the socket does not have enough buffer space available to hold the message being sent, send() blocks, unless the socket has been placed in non-blocking I/O mode (see fcntl(2) ). The select(3C) or poll(2) call may be used to determine when it is possible to send more data.

The flags parameter is formed from the bitwise OR of zero or more of the following:

MSG_OOB
Send ‘out-of-band’ data on sockets that support this notion. The underlying protocol must also support ‘out-of-band’ data. Only SOCK_STREAM sockets created in the AF_INET address family support out-of-band data.
MSG_DONTROUTE
The SO_DONTROUTE option is turned on for the duration of the operation. It is used only by diagnostic or routing programs.

See recv(3N) for a description of the msghdr structure.

Return Values

These calls return the number of bytes sent, or -1 if an error occurred.

Errors

The calls fail if:

EBADF
s is an invalid file descriptor.
EINTR
The operation was interrupted by delivery of a signal before any data could be buffered to be sent.
EINVAL
tolen is not the size of a valid address for the specified address family.
EMSGSIZE
The socket requires that message be sent atomically, and the message was too long.
ENOMEM
There was insufficient memory available to complete the operation.
ENOSR
There were insufficient STREAMS resources available for the operation to complete.
ENOTSOCK
s is not a socket.
EWOULDBLOCK
The socket is marked non-blocking and the requested operation would block.

See Also

fcntl(2) , poll(2) , write(2) , connect(3N) , getsockopt(3N) , recv(3N) , select(3C) , socket(3N)


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