NAME

       socketpair - create a pair of connected sockets

SYNOPSIS

       #include <sys/types.h>          /* See NOTES */
       #include <sys/socket.h>

       int socketpair(int domain, int type, int protocol, int sv[2]);

DESCRIPTION

       The  socketpair()  call  creates  an  unnamed  pair  of connected sockets in the specified
       domain, of the specified type, and using the optionally specified protocol.   For  further
       details of these arguments, see socket(2).

       The  file descriptors used in referencing the new sockets are returned in sv[0] and sv[1].
       The two sockets are indistinguishable.

RETURN VALUE

       On success, zero is returned.  On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set appropriately.

       On Linux (and other systems), socketpair() does not modify sv on failure.   A  requirement
       standardizing this behavior was added in POSIX.1-2016.

ERRORS

       EAFNOSUPPORT
              The specified address family is not supported on this machine.

       EFAULT The address sv does not specify a valid part of the process address space.

       EMFILE The per-process limit on the number of open file descriptors has been reached.

       ENFILE The system-wide limit on the total number of open files has been reached.

       EOPNOTSUPP
              The specified protocol does not support creation of socket pairs.

       EPROTONOSUPPORT
              The specified protocol is not supported on this machine.

CONFORMING TO

       POSIX.1-2001,  POSIX.1-2008,  4.4BSD.   socketpair()  first  appeared  in  4.2BSD.   It is
       generally portable to/from non-BSD systems supporting  clones  of  the  BSD  socket  layer
       (including System V variants).

NOTES

       On  Linux, the only supported domain for this call is AF_UNIX (or synonymously, AF_LOCAL).
       (Most implementations have the same restriction.)

       Since Linux 2.6.27, socketpair() supports the SOCK_NONBLOCK and SOCK_CLOEXEC flags in  the
       type argument, as described in socket(2).

       POSIX.1  does  not  require  the  inclusion  of <sys/types.h>, and this header file is not
       required on Linux.  However, some historical (BSD) implementations  required  this  header
       file, and portable applications are probably wise to include it.

SEE ALSO

       pipe(2), read(2), socket(2), write(2), socket(7), unix(7)

COLOPHON

       This  page  is  part of release 4.15 of the Linux man-pages project.  A description of the
       project, information about reporting bugs, and the latest version of  this  page,  can  be
       found at https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.