BSD Sockets Interface Programmer's Guide

Chapter 8 175

Programming Hints

Summary Tables for System and Library Calls

BSD Sockets attempts to isolate host-speciﬁc information from

applications by providing library calls that return the necessary

information.

The following table contains a summary of the library calls used with

BSD Sockets. The library calls are in the common “c” library named

libc.sl. Therefore, there is no need to specify any library name on the

cc command line to use these library calls, libc.sl is used

automatically.

select Can be used to improve efﬁciency for a process that

accesses multiple sockets or other I/O devices

simultaneously. Refer to the sections on

“Synchronous I/O Multiplexing with Select.”

ioctl Can be used for ﬁnding the number of receivable

bytes with FIONREAD and for setting the

nonblocking I/O ﬂag with FIOSBNBIO. Can also be

used for setting a socket to receive asynchronous

signals with FIOASYNC .

fcntl Can be used for duplicating a socket descriptor and

for setting the O_NDELAY or O_NONBLOCK ﬂag.

System Call Description