Which one does ioctl
of FIONREAD
return, the next packet's length, or the length of all data in the buffer?
Suppose there is a UDP
server that receives 2 packets from a client 1 and another 2 packets from client 2 after client 1's packet.
Then, what is the value of ioctl
of FIONREAD
,
and what does readfrom
return in that case?
Client 1 : v two packets
++UDP Server got 4 packets <- FIONREAD?
Client 2 : ^ two packets
man udp (7) states:
FIONREAD (SIOCINQ) Gets a pointer to an integer as argument. Returns the size of the next pending datagram in the integer in bytes, or 0 when no datagram is pending. Warning: Using FIONREAD, it is impossible to distinguish the case where no datagram is pending from the case where the next pending datagram contains zero bytes of data. It is safer to use select(2), poll(2), or epoll(7) to distinguish these cases.
So, the answer to your question is: FIONREAD returns the size of the next (first) pending datagram.