On Friday 06 April 2007 22:51, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On Thursday 05 April 2007, Jamie Lokier wrote:
> > Sylvain Petreolle wrote:
> > > Was incorrect before too, since it was sizeof(int) in the first place ?
> >
> > The old type of "val" was "int", so it made no different to the size.
> > When "val" is of type socklen_t, it matters.
>
> val is still of type int which is fine ... socklen_t is for the variable
> which describes the length of val
It's worth noting that socklen_t should be "int" anyway.
From the accept(2) manpage:
NOTE
The third argument of accept() was originally declared as an `int *'
(and is that under libc4 and libc5 and on many other systems like 4.x
BSD, SunOS 4, SGI); a POSIX.1g draft standard wanted to change it into
a `size_t *', and that is what it is for SunOS 5. Later POSIX drafts
have `socklen_t *', and so do the Single Unix Specification and glibc2.
Quoting Linus Torvalds:
"_Any_ sane library _must_ have "socklen_t" be the same size as int.
Anything else breaks any BSD socket layer stuff. POSIX initially did
make it a size_t, and I (and hopefully others, but obviously not too
many) complained to them very loudly indeed. Making it a size_t is
completely broken, exactly because size_t very seldom is the same size
as "int" on 64-bit architectures, for example. And it has to be the
same size as "int" because that's what the BSD socket interface is.
Anyway, the POSIX people eventually got a clue, and created
"socklen_t". They shouldn't have touched it in the first place, but
once they did they felt it had to have a named type for some unfath-
omable reason (probably somebody didn't like losing face over having
done the original stupid thing, so they silently just renamed their
blunder)."
