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open, creat

open and possibly create a file or device

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <fcntl.h>

int open(const char *pathname, int flags);
int open(const char *pathname, int flags, mode_t mode);
int creat(const char *pathname, mode_t mode);

Given a pathname for a file, open() returns a file descriptor, a small, nonnegative integer for use in subsequent system calls (read(2), write(2), lseek(2), fcntl(2), etc.). The file descriptor returned by a successful call will be the lowest-numbered file descriptor not currently open for the process.

By default, the new file descriptor is set to remain open across an execve(2) (i.e., the FD_CLOEXEC file descriptor flag described in fcntl(2) is initially disabled; the O_CLOEXEC flag, described below, can be used to change this default). The file offset is set to the beginning of the file (see lseek(2)).

A call to open() creates a new open file description, an entry in the system-wide table of open files. This entry records the file offset and the file status flags (modifiable via the fcntl(2) F_SETFL operation). A file descriptor is a reference to one of these entries; this reference is unaffected if pathname is subsequently removed or modified to refer to a different file. The new open file description is initially not shared with any other process, but sharing may arise via fork(2).

The argument flags must include one of the following access modes: O_RDONLY, O_WRONLY, or O_RDWR. These request opening the file read-only, write-only, or read/write, respectively.

In addition, zero or more file creation flags and file status flags can be bitwise-or'd in flags. The file creation flags are O_CLOEXEC, O_CREAT, O_DIRECTORY, O_EXCL, O_NOCTTY, O_NOFOLLOW, O_TRUNC, and O_TTY_INIT. The file status flags are all of the remaining flags listed below. The distinction between these two groups of flags is that the file status flags can be retrieved and (in some cases) modified using fcntl(2). The full list of file creation flags and file status flags is as follows:

The file is opened in append mode. Before each write(2), the file offset is positioned at the end of the file, as if with lseek(2). O_APPEND may lead to corrupted files on NFS filesystems if more than one process appends data to a file at once. This is because NFS does not support appending to a file, so the client kernel has to simulate it, which can't be done without a race condition.
Enable signal-driven I/O: generate a signal (SIGIO by default, but this can be changed via fcntl(2)) when input or output becomes possible on this file descriptor. This feature is available only for terminals, pseudoterminals, sockets, and (since Linux 2.6) pipes and FIFOs. See fcntl(2) for further details.
Enable the close-on-exec flag for the new file descriptor. Specifying this flag permits a program to avoid additional fcntl(2) F_SETFD operations to set the FD_CLOEXEC flag. Additionally, use of this flag is essential in some multithreaded programs since using a separate fcntl(2) F_SETFD operation to set the FD_CLOEXEC flag does not suffice to avoid race conditions where one thread opens a file descriptor at the same time as another thread does a fork(2) plus execve(2).
If the file does not exist it will be created. The owner (user ID) of the file is set to the effective user ID of the process. The group ownership (group ID) is set either to the effective group ID of the process or to the group ID of the parent directory (depending on filesystem type and mount options, and the mode of the parent directory, see the mount options bsdgroups and sysvgroups described in mount(8)).

mode specifies the permissions to use in case a new file is created. This argument must be supplied when O_CREAT is specified in flags; if O_CREAT is not specified, then mode is ignored. The effective permissions are modified by the process's umask in the usual way: The permissions of the created file are (mode & ~umask). Note that this mode applies only to future accesses of the newly created file; the open() call that creates a read-only file may well return a read/write file descriptor.

The following symbolic constants are provided for mode:

00700 user (file owner) has read, write and execute permission
00400 user has read permission
00200 user has write permission
00100 user has execute permission
00070 group has read, write and execute permission
00040 group has read permission
00020 group has write permission
00010 group has execute permission
00007 others have read, write and execute permission
00004 others have read permission
00002 others have write permission
00001 others have execute permission
Try to minimize cache effects of the I/O to and from this file. In general this will degrade performance, but it is useful in special situations, such as when applications do their own caching. File I/O is done directly to/from user-space buffers. The O_DIRECT flag on its own makes an effort to transfer data synchronously, but does not give the guarantees of the O_SYNC flag that data and necessary metadata are transferred. To guarantee synchronous I/O, O_SYNC must be used in addition to O_DIRECT. See NOTES below for further discussion.

A semantically similar (but deprecated) interface for block devices is described in raw(8).

If pathname is not a directory, cause the open to fail. This flag is Linux-specific, and was added in kernel version 2.1.126, to avoid denial-of-service problems if opendir(3) is called on a FIFO or tape device.
Ensure that this call creates the file: if this flag is specified in conjunction with O_CREAT, and pathname already exists, then open() will fail.

When these two flags are specified, symbolic links are not followed: if pathname is a symbolic link, then open() fails regardless of where the symbolic link points to.

In general, the behavior of O_EXCL is undefined if it is used without O_CREAT. There is one exception: on Linux 2.6 and later, O_EXCL can be used without O_CREAT if pathname refers to a block device. If the block device is in use by the system (e.g., mounted), open() fails with the error EBUSY.

On NFS, O_EXCL is supported only when using NFSv3 or later on kernel 2.6 or later. In NFS environments where O_EXCL support is not provided, programs that rely on it for performing locking tasks will contain a race condition. Portable programs that want to perform atomic file locking using a lockfile, and need to avoid reliance on NFS support for O_EXCL, can create a unique file on the same filesystem (e.g., incorporating hostname and PID), and use link(2) to make a link to the lockfile. If link(2) returns 0, the lock is successful. Otherwise, use stat(2) on the unique file to check if its link count has increased to 2, in which case the lock is also successful.

(LFS) Allow files whose sizes cannot be represented in an off_t (but can be represented in an off64_t) to be opened. The _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE macro must be defined (before including any header files) in order to obtain this definition. Setting the _FILE_OFFSET_BITS feature test macro to 64 (rather than using O_LARGEFILE) is the preferred method of accessing large files on 32-bit systems (see feature_test_macros(7)).
Do not update the file last access time (st_atime in the inode) when the file is read(2). This flag is intended for use by indexing or backup programs, where its use can significantly reduce the amount of disk activity. This flag may not be effective on all filesystems. One example is NFS, where the server maintains the access time.
If pathname refers to a terminal device—see tty(4)—it will not become the process's controlling terminal even if the process does not have one.
If pathname is a symbolic link, then the open fails. This is a FreeBSD extension, which was added to Linux in version 2.1.126. Symbolic links in earlier components of the pathname will still be followed. See also O_NOPATH below.
When possible, the file is opened in nonblocking mode. Neither the open() nor any subsequent operations on the file descriptor which is returned will cause the calling process to wait. For the handling of FIFOs (named pipes), see also fifo(7). For a discussion of the effect of O_NONBLOCK in conjunction with mandatory file locks and with file leases, see fcntl(2).
Obtain a file descriptor that can be used for two purposes: to indicate a location in the filesystem tree and to perform operations that act purely at the file descriptor level. The file itself is not opened, and other file operations (e.g., read(2), write(2), fchmod(2), fchown(2), fgetxattr(2), mmap(2)) fail with the error EBADF.

The following operations can be performed on the resulting file descriptor:

  • close(2); fchdir(2) (since Linux 3.5); fstat(2) (since Linux 3.6).
  • Duplicating the file descriptor (dup(2), fcntl(2) F_DUPFD, etc.).
  • Getting and setting file descriptor flags (fcntl(2) F_GETFD and F_SETFD).
  • Retrieving open file status flags using the fcntl(2) F_GETFL operation: the returned flags will include the bit O_PATH.

  • Passing the file descriptor as the dirfd argument of openat(2) and the other "*at()" system calls.
  • Passing the file descriptor to another process via a UNIX domain socket (see SCM_RIGHTS in unix(7)).
When O_PATH is specified in flags, flag bits other than O_DIRECTORY and O_NOFOLLOW are ignored.

If the O_NOFOLLOW flag is also specified, then the call returns a file descriptor referring to the symbolic link. This file descriptor can be used as the dirfd argument in calls to fchownat(2), fstatat(2), linkat(2), and readlinkat(2) with an empty pathname to have the calls operate on the symbolic link.

The file is opened for synchronous I/O. Any write(2)s on the resulting file descriptor will block the calling process until the data has been physically written to the underlying hardware. But see NOTES below.
If the file already exists and is a regular file and the open mode allows writing (i.e., is O_RDWR or O_WRONLY) it will be truncated to length 0. If the file is a FIFO or terminal device file, the O_TRUNC flag is ignored. Otherwise the effect of O_TRUNC is unspecified.

Some of these optional flags can be altered using fcntl(2) after the file has been opened.

creat() is equivalent to open() with flags equal to O_CREAT|O_WRONLY|O_TRUNC.

open() and creat() return the new file descriptor, or -1 if an error occurred (in which case, errno is set appropriately).

The requested access to the file is not allowed, or search permission is denied for one of the directories in the path prefix of pathname, or the file did not exist yet and write access to the parent directory is not allowed. (See also path_resolution(7).)
Where O_CREAT is specified, the file does not exist, and the user's quota of disk blocks or inodes on the filesystem has been exhausted.
pathname already exists and O_CREAT and O_EXCL were used.
pathname points outside your accessible address space.
See EOVERFLOW.
While blocked waiting to complete an open of a slow device (e.g., a FIFO; see fifo(7)), the call was interrupted by a signal handler; see signal(7).
The filesystem does not support the O_DIRECT flag. See NOTES for more information.
pathname refers to a directory and the access requested involved writing (that is, O_WRONLY or O_RDWR is set).
Too many symbolic links were encountered in resolving pathname, or O_NOFOLLOW was specified but pathname was a symbolic link.
The process already has the maximum number of files open.
pathname was too long.
The system limit on the total number of open files has been reached.
pathname refers to a device special file and no corresponding device exists. (This is a Linux kernel bug; in this situation ENXIO must be returned.)
O_CREAT is not set and the named file does not exist. Or, a directory component in pathname does not exist or is a dangling symbolic link.
Insufficient kernel memory was available.
pathname was to be created but the device containing pathname has no room for the new file.
A component used as a directory in pathname is not, in fact, a directory, or O_DIRECTORY was specified and pathname was not a directory.
O_NONBLOCK | O_WRONLY is set, the named file is a FIFO and no process has the file open for reading. Or, the file is a device special file and no corresponding device exists.
pathname refers to a regular file that is too large to be opened. The usual scenario here is that an application compiled on a 32-bit platform without -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 tried to open a file whose size exceeds (2<<31)-1 bits; see also O_LARGEFILE above. This is the error specified by POSIX.1-2001; in kernels before 2.6.24, Linux gave the error EFBIG for this case.
The O_NOATIME flag was specified, but the effective user ID of the caller did not match the owner of the file and the caller was not privileged (CAP_FOWNER).
pathname refers to a file on a read-only filesystem and write access was requested.
pathname refers to an executable image which is currently being executed and write access was requested.
The O_NONBLOCK flag was specified, and an incompatible lease was held on the file (see fcntl(2)).

SVr4, 4.3BSD, POSIX.1-2001. The O_DIRECTORY, O_NOATIME, O_NOFOLLOW, and O_PATH flags are Linux-specific, and one may need to define _GNU_SOURCE (before including any header files) to obtain their definitions.

The O_CLOEXEC flag is not specified in POSIX.1-2001, but is specified in POSIX.1-2008.

O_DIRECT is not specified in POSIX; one has to define _GNU_SOURCE (before including any header files) to get its definition.

Under Linux, the O_NONBLOCK flag indicates that one wants to open but does not necessarily have the intention to read or write. This is typically used to open devices in order to get a file descriptor for use with ioctl(2).

Unlike the other values that can be specified in flags, the access mode values O_RDONLY, O_WRONLY, and O_RDWR, do not specify individual bits. Rather, they define the low order two bits of flags, and are defined respectively as 0, 1, and 2. In other words, the combination O_RDONLY | O_WRONLY is a logical error, and certainly does not have the same meaning as O_RDWR. Linux reserves the special, nonstandard access mode 3 (binary 11) in flags to mean: check for read and write permission on the file and return a descriptor that can't be used for reading or writing. This nonstandard access mode is used by some Linux drivers to return a descriptor that is to be used only for device-specific ioctl(2) operations.

The (undefined) effect of O_RDONLY | O_TRUNC varies among implementations. On many systems the file is actually truncated.

There are many infelicities in the protocol underlying NFS, affecting amongst others O_SYNC and O_NDELAY.

POSIX provides for three different variants of synchronized I/O, corresponding to the flags O_SYNC, O_DSYNC, and O_RSYNC. Currently (2.6.31), Linux implements only O_SYNC, but glibc maps O_DSYNC and O_RSYNC to the same numerical value as O_SYNC. Most Linux filesystems don't actually implement the POSIX O_SYNC semantics, which require all metadata updates of a write to be on disk on returning to user space, but only the O_DSYNC semantics, which require only actual file data and metadata necessary to retrieve it to be on disk by the time the system call returns.

Note that open() can open device special files, but creat() cannot create them; use mknod(2) instead.

On NFS filesystems with UID mapping enabled, open() may return a file descriptor but, for example, read(2) requests are denied with EACCES. This is because the client performs open() by checking the permissions, but UID mapping is performed by the server upon read and write requests.

If the file is newly created, its st_atime, st_ctime, st_mtime fields (respectively, time of last access, time of last status change, and time of last modification; see stat(2)) are set to the current time, and so are the st_ctime and st_mtime fields of the parent directory. Otherwise, if the file is modified because of the O_TRUNC flag, its st_ctime and st_mtime fields are set to the current time.

The O_DIRECT flag may impose alignment restrictions on the length and address of user-space buffers and the file offset of I/Os. In Linux alignment restrictions vary by filesystem and kernel version and might be absent entirely. However there is currently no filesystem-independent interface for an application to discover these restrictions for a given file or filesystem. Some filesystems provide their own interfaces for doing so, for example the XFS_IOC_DIOINFO operation in xfsctl(3).

Under Linux 2.4, transfer sizes, and the alignment of the user buffer and the file offset must all be multiples of the logical block size of the filesystem. Under Linux 2.6, alignment to 512-byte boundaries suffices.

O_DIRECT I/Os should never be run concurrently with the fork(2) system call, if the memory buffer is a private mapping (i.e., any mapping created with the mmap(2) MAP_PRIVATE flag; this includes memory allocated on the heap and statically allocated buffers). Any such I/Os, whether submitted via an asynchronous I/O interface or from another thread in the process, should be completed before fork(2) is called. Failure to do so can result in data corruption and undefined behavior in parent and child processes. This restriction does not apply when the memory buffer for the O_DIRECT I/Os was created using shmat(2) or mmap(2) with the MAP_SHARED flag. Nor does this restriction apply when the memory buffer has been advised as MADV_DONTFORK with madvise(2), ensuring that it will not be available to the child after fork(2).

The O_DIRECT flag was introduced in SGI IRIX, where it has alignment restrictions similar to those of Linux 2.4. IRIX has also a fcntl(2) call to query appropriate alignments, and sizes. FreeBSD 4.x introduced a flag of the same name, but without alignment restrictions.

O_DIRECT support was added under Linux in kernel version 2.4.10. Older Linux kernels simply ignore this flag. Some filesystems may not implement the flag and open() will fail with EINVAL if it is used.

Applications should avoid mixing O_DIRECT and normal I/O to the same file, and especially to overlapping byte regions in the same file. Even when the filesystem correctly handles the coherency issues in this situation, overall I/O throughput is likely to be slower than using either mode alone. Likewise, applications should avoid mixing mmap(2) of files with direct I/O to the same files.

The behaviour of O_DIRECT with NFS will differ from local filesystems. Older kernels, or kernels configured in certain ways, may not support this combination. The NFS protocol does not support passing the flag to the server, so O_DIRECT I/O will bypass the page cache only on the client; the server may still cache the I/O. The client asks the server to make the I/O synchronous to preserve the synchronous semantics of O_DIRECT. Some servers will perform poorly under these circumstances, especially if the I/O size is small. Some servers may also be configured to lie to clients about the I/O having reached stable storage; this will avoid the performance penalty at some risk to data integrity in the event of server power failure. The Linux NFS client places no alignment restrictions on O_DIRECT I/O.

In summary, O_DIRECT is a potentially powerful tool that should be used with caution. It is recommended that applications treat use of O_DIRECT as a performance option which is disabled by default.

"The thing that has always disturbed me about O_DIRECT is that the whole interface is just stupid, and was probably designed by a deranged monkey on some serious mind-controlling substances."—Linus

Currently, it is not possible to enable signal-driven I/O by specifying O_ASYNC when calling open(); use fcntl(2) to enable this flag.

chmod(2), chown(2), close(2), dup(2), fcntl(2), link(2), lseek(2), mknod(2), mmap(2), mount(2), openat(2), read(2), socket(2), stat(2), umask(2), unlink(2), write(2), fopen(3), fifo(7), path_resolution(7), symlink(7)

This page is part of release 3.54 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/.