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man pages section 3: Basic Library Functions

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Updated: Wednesday, July 27, 2022
 
 

sendmsg (3C)

Name

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

Synopsis

#include <sys/socket.h>

ssize_t send(int s, const void *msg, size_t len, int flags);
ssize_t sendto(int s, const void *msg, size_t len, int flags,
     const struct sockaddr *to, socklen_t tolen);
ssize_t sendmsg(int s, const struct msghdr *msg, int flags);

Description

The send(), sendto(), and sendmsg() functions are used to transmit a message to another transport end-point. The send() function can be used only when the socket is in a connected state. See connect(3C). The sendto() and sendmsg() functions can be used at any time. The s socket is created with socket(3C).

The address of the target is supplied by to with a tolen parameter used to specify the size. The length of the message is supplied by the len parameter. For socket types such as SOCK_DGRAM and SOCK_RAW that require atomic messages, the error EMSGSIZE is returned and the message is not transmitted when it is too long to pass atomically through the underlying protocol. The same restrictions do not apply to SOCK_STREAM sockets.

A return value −1 indicates locally detected errors. It does not imply a delivery failure.

If the socket does not have enough buffer space available to hold a message, the send() function blocks the message, unless the socket has been placed in non-blocking I/O mode (see fcntl(2)). The select(3C) or poll(2) call can 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 or the AF_INET6 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.

MSG_NOSIGNAL

The MSG_NOSIGNAL flag requests not to send the SIGPIPE signal if an attempt to send is made on a stream-oriented socket that is no longer connected. The EPIPE error is still returned.

The sendmsg() function call uses a msghdr structure defined in socket.h(3HEAD) to minimize the number of directly supplied parameters. sendmmsg(3C) is an extension of the sendmsg() function that allows receiving multiple messages in a single call.

The contents of the msghdr structure differ depending on whether or not __USE_SUNOS_SOCKETS__ is defined before including the <sys/socket.h> header. All source files accessing msghdr structures or calling the sendmsg() function must be compiled with either __USE_SUNOS_SOCKETS__ defined or all with it undefined — mixing and matching will not work. See the socket.h(3HEAD) manual page for details.

Return Values

Upon successful completion, these functions return the number of bytes sent. Otherwise, they return -1 and set errno to indicate the error.

Errors

The send(), sendto(), and sendmsg() functions return errors under the following conditions:

EBADF

s is not a valid file descriptor.

EINTR

The operation was interrupted by delivery of a signal before any data could be buffered to be sent.

EMSGSIZE

The message is too large to be sent all at once (as the socket requires), or the msg_iovlen member of the msghdr structure pointed to by message is less than or equal to 0 or is greater than {IOV_MAX}.

ENOMEM

Insufficient memory is available to complete the operation.

ENOSR

Insufficient STREAMS resources are 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. EWOULDBLOCK is also returned when sufficient memory is not immediately available to allocate a suitable buffer. In such a case, the operation can be retried later. Another reason is if the socket option SO_SNDTIMEO has been set and the requested operation fails to transfer data before the timeout expired. For more information, see the getsockopt(3C) man page.

ECONNREFUSED

The requested connection was refused by the peer. For connected IPv4 and IPv6 datagram sockets, this indicates that the system received an ICMP Destination Port Unreachable message from the peer in response to some prior transmission.

The send() and sendto() functions return errors under the following conditions:

EFAULT

buf points to an illegal address.

EINVAL

The len argument overflows a ssize_t.

Inconsistent port attributes for system call.

The sendto() function returns errors under the following conditions:

EINVAL

The value specified for the tolen parameter is not the size of a valid address for the specified address family.

EISCONN

A destination address was specified and the socket is already connected.

The sendmsg() function returns errors under the following conditions:

EFAULT

msg points to an illegal address.

EINVAL

The msg_iovlen member of the msghdr structure pointed to by msg is less than or equal to 0, or the sum of the iov_len values in the msg_iov array overflows a ssize_t.

One of the iov_len values in the msg_iov array member of the msghdr structure pointed to by msg is negative, or the sum of the iov_len values in the msg_iov array overflows a ssize_t.

msg_iov contents are inconsistent with port attributes.

The send() function returns errors under the following conditions:

EPIPE

The socket is shut down for writing, or the socket is connection–mode and is no longer connected. In the latter case, if the socket is of type SOCK_STREAM, the SIGPIPE signal is generated to the calling thread unless MSG_NOSIGNAL is set.

Attributes

See attributes(7) for descriptions of the following attributes:

ATTRIBUTE TYPE
ATTRIBUTE VALUE
Interface Stability
Committed
MT-Level
Async-Signal-Safe
Standard

See Also

fcntl(2), poll(2), write(2), connect(3C), getsockopt(3C), recv(3C), select(3C), sendmmsg(3C), socket(3C), socket.h(3HEAD), attributes(7)

History

These functions have been present since the initial release of Solaris.