Socket.receiveMessage

Receive data from a socket. This is the most complicated and fully-featured version of this call. For easier use, see g_socket_receive() and g_socket_receive_from().

If @address is non-%NULL then @address will be set equal to the source address of the received packet. @address is owned by the caller.

@vector must point to an array of #GInputVector structs and @num_vectors must be the length of this array. These structs describe the buffers that received data will be scattered into. If @num_vectors is -1, then @vectors is assumed to be terminated by a #GInputVector with a %NULL buffer pointer.

As a special case, if @num_vectors is 0 (in which case, @vectors may of course be %NULL), then a single byte is received and discarded. This is to facilitate the common practice of sending a single '\0' byte for the purposes of transferring ancillary data.

@messages, if non-%NULL, will be set to point to a newly-allocated array of #GSocketControlMessage instances or %NULL if no such messages was received. These correspond to the control messages received from the kernel, one #GSocketControlMessage per message from the kernel. This array is %NULL-terminated and must be freed by the caller using g_free() after calling g_object_unref() on each element. If @messages is %NULL, any control messages received will be discarded.

@num_messages, if non-%NULL, will be set to the number of control messages received.

If both @messages and @num_messages are non-%NULL, then @num_messages gives the number of #GSocketControlMessage instances in @messages (ie: not including the %NULL terminator).

@flags is an in/out parameter. The commonly available arguments for this are available in the #GSocketMsgFlags enum, but the values there are the same as the system values, and the flags are passed in as-is, so you can pass in system-specific flags too (and g_socket_receive_message() may pass system-specific flags out).

As with g_socket_receive(), data may be discarded if @socket is %G_SOCKET_TYPE_DATAGRAM or %G_SOCKET_TYPE_SEQPACKET and you do not provide enough buffer space to read a complete message. You can pass %G_SOCKET_MSG_PEEK in @flags to peek at the current message without removing it from the receive queue, but there is no portable way to find out the length of the message other than by reading it into a sufficiently-large buffer.

If the socket is in blocking mode the call will block until there is some data to receive, the connection is closed, or there is an error. If there is no data available and the socket is in non-blocking mode, a %G_IO_ERROR_WOULD_BLOCK error will be returned. To be notified when data is available, wait for the %G_IO_IN condition.

On error -1 is returned and @error is set accordingly.