ioctl giving Invalid Argument

Question

I want to send a opened file descriptor between two different programs. So I am using ioctl with named pipes to do so. But there I am getting Inval

Answer 1

It looks like linux doesn't support I_SENDFD. The comments indicate that I_SENDFD is in the documentation, but is not actually supported, and results in the error message you encountered. The wikipedia entry for STREAMS states the linux kernel does not have any support for streams. The wikipedia entry does point to a couple of third-party packages that could be used to add streams support, but LiS has not been ported to the 2.6 kernel, and OpenSS7 hasn't had any active development in 4 years.

However, linux does support something similar. This mechanism uses a special message type SCM_RIGHTS to deliver a file descriptor over a UNIX domain socket with sendmsg and obtained from recvmsg. Examples can be found with a simple web search, a complete example seems to be from the book The Linux Programming Interface, with source for sending and receiving.