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NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ERRORS | STANDARDS | HISTORY | BUGS | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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recvmmsg(2) System Calls Manual recvmmsg(2)
recvmmsg - receive multiple messages on a socket
Standard C library (libc, -lc)
#define _GNU_SOURCE /* See feature_test_macros(7) */
#include <sys/socket.h>
int recvmmsg(int sockfd, struct mmsghdr msgvec[.n], unsigned int n,
int flags, struct timespec *timeout);
The recvmmsg() system call is an extension of recvmsg(2) that
allows the caller to receive multiple messages from a socket using
a single system call. (This has performance benefits for some
applications.) A further extension over recvmsg(2) is support for
a timeout on the receive operation.
The sockfd argument is the file descriptor of the socket to
receive data from.
The msgvec argument is a pointer to an array of mmsghdr
structures. The size of this array is specified in n.
The mmsghdr structure is defined in <sys/socket.h> as:
struct mmsghdr {
struct msghdr msg_hdr; /* Message header */
unsigned int msg_len; /* Number of received bytes for header */
};
The msg_hdr field is a msghdr structure, as described in
recvmsg(2). The msg_len field is the number of bytes returned for
the message in the entry. This field has the same value as the
return value of a single recvmsg(2) on the header.
The flags argument contains flags ORed together. The flags are
the same as documented for recvmsg(2), with the following
addition:
MSG_WAITFORONE (since Linux 2.6.34)
Turns on MSG_DONTWAIT after the first message has been
received.
The timeout argument points to a struct timespec (see
clock_gettime(2)) defining a timeout (seconds plus nanoseconds)
for the receive operation (but see BUGS!). (This interval will be
rounded up to the system clock granularity, and kernel scheduling
delays mean that the blocking interval may overrun by a small
amount.) If timeout is NULL, then the operation blocks
indefinitely.
A blocking recvmmsg() call blocks until n messages have been
received or until the timeout expires. A nonblocking call reads
as many messages as are available (up to the limit specified by n)
and returns immediately.
On return from recvmmsg(), successive elements of msgvec are
updated to contain information about each received message:
msg_len contains the size of the received message; the subfields
of msg_hdr are updated as described in recvmsg(2). The return
value of the call indicates the number of elements of msgvec that
have been updated.
On success, recvmmsg() returns the number of messages received in
msgvec; on error, -1 is returned, and errno is set to indicate the
error.
Errors are as for recvmsg(2). In addition, the following error
can occur:
EINVAL timeout is invalid.
See also BUGS.
Linux.
Linux 2.6.33, glibc 2.12.
The timeout argument does not work as intended. The timeout is
checked only after the receipt of each datagram, so that if up to
n-1 datagrams are received before the timeout expires, but then no
further datagrams are received, the call will block forever.
If an error occurs after at least one message has been received,
the call succeeds, and returns the number of messages received.
The error code is expected to be returned on a subsequent call to
recvmmsg(). In the current implementation, however, the error
code can be overwritten in the meantime by an unrelated network
event on a socket, for example an incoming ICMP packet.
The following program uses recvmmsg() to receive multiple messages
on a socket and stores them in multiple buffers. The call returns
if all buffers are filled or if the timeout specified has expired.
The following snippet periodically generates UDP datagrams
containing a random number:
$ while true; do echo $RANDOM > /dev/udp/127.0.0.1/1234;
sleep 0.25; done
These datagrams are read by the example application, which can
give the following output:
$ ./a.out
5 messages received
1 11782
2 11345
3 304
4 13514
5 28421
Program source
#define _GNU_SOURCE
#include <arpa/inet.h>
#include <netinet/in.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/socket.h>
#include <time.h>
int
main(void)
{
#define VLEN 10
#define BUFSIZE 200
#define TIMEOUT 1
int sockfd, retval;
char bufs[VLEN][BUFSIZE+1];
struct iovec iovecs[VLEN];
struct mmsghdr msgs[VLEN];
struct timespec timeout;
struct sockaddr_in addr;
sockfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, 0);
if (sockfd == -1) {
perror("socket()");
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
addr.sin_family = AF_INET;
addr.sin_addr.s_addr = htonl(INADDR_LOOPBACK);
addr.sin_port = htons(1234);
if (bind(sockfd, (struct sockaddr *) &addr, sizeof(addr)) == -1) {
perror("bind()");
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
memset(msgs, 0, sizeof(msgs));
for (size_t i = 0; i < VLEN; i++) {
iovecs[i].iov_base = bufs[i];
iovecs[i].iov_len = BUFSIZE;
msgs[i].msg_hdr.msg_iov = &iovecs[i];
msgs[i].msg_hdr.msg_iovlen = 1;
}
timeout.tv_sec = TIMEOUT;
timeout.tv_nsec = 0;
retval = recvmmsg(sockfd, msgs, VLEN, 0, &timeout);
if (retval == -1) {
perror("recvmmsg()");
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
printf("%d messages received\n", retval);
for (size_t i = 0; i < retval; i++) {
bufs[i][msgs[i].msg_len] = 0;
printf("%zu %s", i+1, bufs[i]);
}
exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}
clock_gettime(2), recvmsg(2), sendmmsg(2), sendmsg(2), socket(2),
socket(7)
This page is part of the man-pages (Linux kernel and C library
user-space interface documentation) project. Information about
the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩. If you have a bug report
for this manual page, see
⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩.
This page was obtained from the tarball man-pages-6.15.tar.gz
fetched from
⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on
2025-08-11. If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-
to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
Linux man-pages 6.15 2025-05-17 recvmmsg(2)
Pages that refer to this page: recv(2), sendmmsg(2), syscalls(2), signal(7)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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