CLOSE(2) Linux Programmer's Manual CLOSE(2)NAMEclose - close a file descriptor
SYNOPSIS
#include <unistd.h>
int close(int fd);
DESCRIPTIONclose() closes a file descriptor, so that it no longer refers to any
file and may be reused. Any record locks (see fcntl(2)) held on the
file it was associated with, and owned by the process, are removed
(regardless of the file descriptor that was used to obtain the lock).
If fd is the last file descriptor referring to the underlying open file
description (see open(2)), the resources associated with the open file
description are freed; if the descriptor was the last reference to a
file which has been removed using unlink(2), the file is deleted.
RETURN VALUEclose() returns zero on success. On error, -1 is returned, and errno
is set appropriately.
ERRORS
EBADF fd isn't a valid open file descriptor.
EINTR The close() call was interrupted by a signal; see signal(7).
EIO An I/O error occurred.
CONFORMING TO
SVr4, 4.3BSD, POSIX.1-2001.
NOTES
Not checking the return value of close() is a common but nevertheless
serious programming error. It is quite possible that errors on a pre‐
vious write(2) operation are first reported at the final close(). Not
checking the return value when closing the file may lead to silent loss
of data. This can especially be observed with NFS and with disk quota.
Note that the return value should only be used for diagnostics. In
particular close() should not be retried after an EINTR since this may
cause a reused descriptor from another thread to be closed.
A successful close does not guarantee that the data has been success‐
fully saved to disk, as the kernel defers writes. It is not common for
a filesystem to flush the buffers when the stream is closed. If you
need to be sure that the data is physically stored, use fsync(2). (It
will depend on the disk hardware at this point.)
It is probably unwise to close file descriptors while they may be in
use by system calls in other threads in the same process. Since a file
descriptor may be reused, there are some obscure race conditions that
may cause unintended side effects.
SEE ALSOfcntl(2), fsync(2), open(2), shutdown(2), unlink(2), fclose(3)COLOPHON
This page is part of release 3.65 of the Linux man-pages project. A
description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can
be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
Linux 2013-12-30 CLOSE(2)
