acos(3)

acos3

Arc cosine function

Usage

#include <math.h>

double acos(double x); float acosf(float x); long double acosl(long double x);

Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see feature_test_macros(7)):

acosf(), acosl():

    _ISOC99_SOURCE || _POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 200112L
        || /* Since glibc 2.19: */ _DEFAULT_SOURCE
        || /* glibc <= 2.19: */ _BSD_SOURCE || _SVID_SOURCE

Library

Math library (libm, -lm)

Overview

These functions calculate the arc cosine of x; that is the value whose cosine is x.

Return value

On success, these functions return the arc cosine of x in radians; the return value is in the range [0, pi].

If x is a NaN, a NaN is returned.

If x is +1, +0 is returned.

If x is positive infinity or negative infinity, a domain error occurs, and a NaN is returned.

If x is outside the range [-1, 1], a domain error occurs, and a NaN is returned.

Errors

See math_error(7) for information on how to determine whether an error has occurred when calling these functions.

The following errors can occur:

Domain error: x is outside the range [-1, 1]

errno is set to EDOM. An invalid floating-point exception (FE_INVALID) is raised.

Attributes

For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see attributes(7).

InterfaceAttributeValue
acos(), acosf(), acosl()Thread safetyMT-Safe

Releases

19 releases since Debian 1.1 (Buzz); the text changed 13 times.

  1. 1.1–2.2
  2. 3.0
  3. 3.1
  4. 4.0
  5. 5.0
  6. 6.0
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. Arch

Standards

C11, POSIX.1-2008.

History

C99, POSIX.1-2001.

The variant returning double also conforms to C89, SVr4, 4.3BSD.

From man-pages 6.19-1 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.