FTOK

 

NAME

ftok – convert a pathname and a project identifier to a System V IPC key  

SYNOPSIS

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/ipc.h>

key_t ftok(const char *pathname, int proj_id);  

DESCRIPTION

The ftok() function uses the identity of the file named by the given pathname (which must refer to an existing, accessible file) and the least significant 8 bits of proj_id (which must be nonzero) to generate a key_t type System V IPC key, suitable for use with msgget(2), semget(2), or shmget(2).

The resulting value is the same for all pathnames that name the same file, when the same value of proj_id is used. The value returned should be different when the (simultaneously existing) files or the project IDs differ.  

RETURN VALUE

On success, the generated key_t value is returned. On failure -1 is returned, with errno indicating the error as for the stat(2) system call.  

ATTRIBUTES

 

Multithreading (see pthreads(7))

The ftok() function is thread-safe.  

CONFORMING TO

POSIX.1-2001.  

NOTES

On some ancient systems, the prototype was:

key_t ftok(char *pathname, char proj_id);

Today, proj_id is an int, but still only 8 bits are used. Typical usage has an ASCII character proj_id, that is why the behavior is said to be undefined when proj_id is zero.

Of course, no guarantee can be given that the resulting key_t is unique. Typically, a best-effort attempt combines the given proj_id byte, the lower 16 bits of the inode number, and the lower 8 bits of the device number into a 32-bit result. Collisions may easily happen, for example between files on /dev/hda1 and files on /dev/sda1.  

COLOPHON

This page is part of release 3.74 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, information about reporting bugs, and the latest version of this page, can be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.