HP-UX Reference (11i v3 07/02) - 2 System Calls (vol 5)

close(2) close(2)

NAME

close - close a ﬁle descriptor

SYNOPSIS

#include <unistd.h>

int close(int fildes);

DESCRIPTION

close() closes the ﬁle descriptor indicated by ﬁldes. ﬁldes is a ﬁle descriptor obtained from a

creat(),

open(), dup(), fcntl(),or pipe()

system call. All associated ﬁle segments which have been

locked by this process with the

lockf() function are released (i.e., unlocked).

RETURN VALUE

Upon successful completion,

close() returns a value of 0; otherwise, it returns −1 and sets

errno to

indicate the error.

ERRORS

close() fails if the any of following conditions are encountered:

[EBADF] ﬁldes is not a valid open ﬁle descriptor.

[EINTR] An attempt to close a slow device or connection or ﬁle with pending aio requests was

interrupted by a signal. The ﬁle descriptor still points to an open device or connection

or ﬁle.

[ENOSPC] Not enough space on the ﬁle system. This error can occur when closing a ﬁle on an

NFS ﬁle system. [When a write() system call is executed on a local ﬁle system and

if a new buffer needs to be allocated to hold the data, the buffer is mapped onto the

disk at that time. A full disk is detected at this time and write() returns an error.

When the

write() system call is executed on an NFS ﬁle system, the new buffer is

allocated without communicating with the

NFS server to see if there is space for the

buffer (to improve

NFS performance). It is only when the buffer is written to the

server (at ﬁle close or the buffer is full) that the disk-full condition is detected.]