The Sockets Networking API: UNIX® Network Programming Volume 1, Third Edition

Chapter 17. ioctl Operations

Introduction

The ioctl function has traditionally been the system interface used for everything that didn’t fit into some other nicely defined category. POSIX is getting rid of ioctl for certain functionality by creating specific wrapper functions to replace ioctls whose functionality is being standardized by POSIX. For example, the Unix terminal interface was traditionally accessed using ioctl, but POSIX created 12 new functions for terminals: tcgetattr to get the terminal attributes, tcflush to flush pending input or output, and so on. In a similar vein, POSIX has replaced one network ioctl: the new sockatmark function (Section 24.3) replaces the SIOCATMARK ioctl. Nevertheless, numerous ioctls remain for implementation-dependent ...