IOCTL(2) BSD System Calls Manual IOCTL(2)NAMEioctl — control device
LIBRARY
Standard C Library (libc, -lc)
SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/ioctl.h>
int
ioctl(int d, unsigned long request, ...);
DESCRIPTION
The ioctl() system call manipulates the underlying device parameters of
special files. In particular, many operating characteristics of charac‐
ter special files (e.g. terminals) may be controlled with ioctl()
requests. The argument d must be an open file descriptor.
The third argument to ioctl() is traditionally named char *argp. Most
uses of ioctl(), however, require the third argument to be a caddr_t or
an int.
An ioctl() request has encoded in it whether the argument is an “in”
argument or “out” argument, and the size of the argument argp in bytes.
Macros and defines used in specifying an ioctl request are located in the
file <sys/ioctl.h>.
GENERIC IOCTLS
Some generic ioctls are not implemented for all types of file descrip‐
tors. These include:
FIONREAD int
Get the number of bytes that are immediately available for read‐
ing.
FIONWRITE int
Get the number of bytes in the descriptor's send queue. These
bytes are data which has been written to the descriptor but which
are being held by the kernel for further processing. The nature
of the required processing depends on the underlying device. For
TCP sockets, these bytes have not yet been acknowledged by the
other side of the connection.
FIONSPACE int
Get the free space in the descriptor's send queue. This value is
the size of the send queue minus the number of bytes being held
in the queue. Note: while this value represents the number of
bytes that may be added to the queue, other resource limitations
may cause a write not larger than the send queue's space to be
blocked. One such limitation would be a lack of network buffers
for a write to a network connection.
RETURN VALUES
If an error has occurred, a value of -1 is returned and errno is set to
indicate the error.
ERRORS
The ioctl() system call will fail if:
[EBADF] The d argument is not a valid descriptor.
[ENOTTY] The d argument is not associated with a character spe‐
cial device.
[ENOTTY] The specified request does not apply to the kind of
object that the descriptor d references.
[EINVAL] The request or argp argument is not valid.
[EFAULT] The argp argument points outside the process's allo‐
cated address space.
SEE ALSOexecve(2), fcntl(2), intro(4), tty(4)HISTORY
The ioctl() function appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX.
BSD May 11, 2010 BSD