bindresvport(3)

bindresvport3

Bind a socket to a privileged ip port

Usage

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <netinet/in.h>

int bindresvport(int sockfd, struct sockaddr_in *sin);

Library

Standard C library (libc, -lc)

Overview

bindresvport() is used to bind the socket referred to by the file descriptor sockfd to a privileged anonymous IP port, that is, a port number arbitrarily selected from the range 512 to 1023.

If the bind(2) performed by bindresvport() is successful, and sin is not NULL, then sin->sin_port returns the port number actually allocated.

sin can be NULL, in which case sin->sin_family is implicitly taken to be AF_INET. However, in this case, bindresvport() has no way to return the port number actually allocated. (This information can later be obtained using getsockname(2).)

Return value

bindresvport() returns 0 on success; otherwise -1 is returned and errno is set to indicate the error.

Errors

bindresvport() can fail for any of the same reasons as bind(2). In addition, the following errors may occur:

EACCES

The calling process was not privileged (on Linux: the calling process did not have the CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE capability in the user namespace governing its network namespace).

EADDRINUSE

All privileged ports are in use.

EAFNOSUPPORT (EPFNOSUPPORT in glibc 2.7 and earlier)

sin is not NULL and sin->sin_family is not AF_INET.

Attributes

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

InterfaceAttributeValue
bindresvport()Thread safetyglibc >= 2.17: MT-Safe; glibc < 2.17: MT-Unsafe

The bindresvport() function uses a static variable that was not protected by a lock before glibc 2.17, rendering the function MT-Unsafe.

Versions

Present on the BSDs, Solaris, and many other systems.

Notes

Unlike some bindresvport() implementations, the glibc implementation ignores any value that the caller supplies in sin->sin_port.

Releases

14 releases since Debian 2.2 (Potato); the text changed 13 times.

  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

BSD.

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