Waiting for I/O Operation to Complete

You can wait for one or more outstanding asynchronous I/O operations to complete by calling aio_suspend() or aio_waitn(). Use aio_error() and aio_return() on the completed asynchronous I/O control blocks to determine the success or failure of the I/O operation.

The aio_suspend() and aio_waitn() functions take a timeout argument, which indicates how long the caller is willing to wait. A NULL pointer means that the caller is willing to wait indefinitely. A pointer to a structure containing a zero value means that the caller is unwilling to wait at all.

You might start an asynchronous I/O operation, do some work, then call aio_suspend() or aio_waitn() to wait for the request to complete. Or you can rely on the asynchronous notification event specified in aio_sigevent() to occur to notify you when the operation completes.

Finally, a pending asynchronous I/O operation can be cancelled by calling aio_cancel(). This function is called with the address of the I/O control block that was used to initiate the I/O operation.