fcntl(fd, F_GETFD) is the canonical cheapest way to check that fd is a valid open file descriptor. If you need to batch-check a lot, using poll with a zero timeout and the events member set to 0 and checking for POLLNVAL in revents after it returns is more efficient. With that said, the operation “check … Read more
Per the standards, there is no way to increase FD_SETSIZE. Some programs and libraries (libevent comes to mind) try to work around this by allocating additional space for the fd_set object and passing values larger than FD_SETSIZE to the FD_* macros, but this is a very bad idea since robust implementations may perform bounds-checking on … Read more
Stevens (et al) UNIX® Network Programming, Vol 1: The Sockets Networking API describes the process of transferring file descriptors between processes in Chapter 15 Unix Domain Protocols and specifically §15.7 Passing Descriptors. It’s fiddly to describe in full, but it must be done on a Unix domain socket (AF_UNIX or AF_LOCAL), and the sender process … Read more
Your best bet is to try sending the file descriptor over a Unix domain socket. This is described in Stephens, and in a few places on the web, but I can dig up code for you if you ask nicely. This will be pretty portable these days; a lot of the things considered “non-portable” way … Read more
A file descriptor is a low-level integer “handle” used to identify an opened file (or socket, or whatever) at the kernel level, in Linux and other Unix-like systems. You pass “naked” file descriptors to actual Unix calls, such as read(), write() and so on. A FILE pointer is a C standard library-level construct, used to … Read more
A single listening port can accept more than one connection simultaneously. There is a ’64K’ limit that is often cited, but that is per client per server port, and needs clarifying. Each TCP/IP packet has basically four fields for addressing. These are: source_ip source_port destination_ip destination_port <—– client ——> <——— server ————> Inside the TCP … Read more
In simple words, when you open a file, the operating system creates an entry to represent that file and store the information about that opened file. So if there are 100 files opened in your OS then there will be 100 entries in OS (somewhere in kernel). These entries are represented by integers like (…100, … Read more
From the answer given by Éric Malenfant: AFAIK, there is no way to do this in standard C++. Depending on your platform, your implementation of the standard library may offer (as a nonstandard extension) a fstream constructor taking a file descriptor as input. (This is the case for libstdc++, IIRC) or a FILE*. Based on … Read more
You can use readlink on /proc/self/fd/NNN where NNN is the file descriptor. This will give you the name of the file as it was when it was opened — however, if the file was moved or deleted since then, it may no longer be accurate (although Linux can track renames in some cases). To verify, … Read more