recv(), recvfrom(), and recvmsg() are used to receive messages from another socket. recv() may be used only on a connected socket (see connect(3SOCKET)), while recvfrom() and recvmsg() may be used to receive data on a socket whether it is in a connected state or not. s is a socket created with socket(3SOCKET).

If from is not a NULL pointer, the source address of the message is filled in. fromlen is a value-result parameter, initialized to the size of the buffer associated with from, and modified on return to indicate the actual size of the address stored there. The length of the message is returned. If a message is too long to fit in the supplied buffer, excess bytes may be discarded depending on the type of socket the message is received from. See socket(3SOCKET).

If no messages are available at the socket, the receive call waits for a message to arrive, unless the socket is nonblocking, in which case -1 is returned with the external variable errno set to EWOULDBLOCK. See fcntl(2).

The select() call may be used to determine when more data arrives.

The flags parameter is formed by ORing one or more of the following:

MSG_OOB

Read any "out-of-band" data present on the socket rather than the regular "in-band" data.

MSG_PEEK

"Peek" at the data present on the socket; the data is returned, but not consumed, so that a subsequent receive operation will see the same data.

The recvmsg() call uses a msghdr structure to minimize the number of directly supplied parameters. This structure is defined in <sys/socket.h> and includes the following members:

caddr_t         msg_name;          /* optional address */
int             msg_namelen;       /* size of address */
struct iovec    *msg_iov;          /* scatter/gather array */
int             msg_iovlen;        /* # elements in msg_iov */
caddr_t         msg_accrights;     /* access rights sent/received */
int             msg_accrightslen;

Here msg_name and msg_namelen specify the destination address if the socket is unconnected; msg_name may be given as a NULL pointer if no names are desired or required. The msg_iov and msg_iovlen describe the scatter-gather locations, as described in read(2). A buffer to receive any access rights sent along with the message is specified in msg_accrights, which has length msg_accrightslen.

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

The recv(), recvfrom(), and recvmsg() functions will fail if:

EBADF

s is an invalid file descriptor.

EINVAL

The MSG_OOB flag is set and no out-of-band data is available.

EINTR

The operation was interrupted by delivery of a signal before any data was available to be received.

EIO

An I/O error occurred while reading from or writing to the file system.

ENOMEM

There was insufficient user memory available for the operation to complete.

ENOSR

There were insufficient STREAMS resources available for the operation to complete.

ENOTSOCK

s is not a socket.

ESTALE

A stale NFS file handle exists.

EWOULDBLOCK

The socket is marked non-blocking and the requested operation would block.

The recv() and recvfrom() functions will fail if:

EINVAL

The len argument overflowed a ssize_t.

The recvmsg() function will fail if:

EINVAL

The msg_iovlen member of the msghdr structure pointed to by msg is less than or equal to 0, or greater than [IOV_MAX}. See Intro(2) for a definition of [IOV_MAX}.

EINVAL

Either one of the iov_len values in the msg_iov array member of the msghdr structure pointed to by msg was negative, or the sum of the iov_len values in the msg_iov array overflowed a ssize_t.

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

fcntl(2), ioctl(2), read(2), connect(3SOCKET), getsockopt(3SOCKET), send(3SOCKET), socket(3HEAD), socket(3SOCKET), attributes(5)