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CLOSE(2) Linux Programmer's Manual CLOSE(2)
NAME
close - close a file descriptor
SYNOPSIS
#include<unistd.h>
intclose(int fd);
DESCRIPTION
close closes a file descriptor, so that it no longer refers to any file
and may be reused. Any locks held on the file it was associated with,
and owned by the process, are removed (regardless of the file descrip-
tor that was used to obtain the lock).
If fd is the last copy of a particular file descriptor the resources
associated with it are freed; if the descriptor was the last reference
to a file which has been removed using unlink(2) the file is deleted.
RETURNVALUE
close returns zero on success, or -1 if an error occurred.
ERRORS
EBADF fd isn't a valid open file descriptor.
EINTR The close() call was interrupted by a signal.
EIO An I/O error occurred.
CONFORMINGTO
SVr4, SVID, POSIX, X/OPEN, BSD 4.3. SVr4 documents an additional ENO-
LINK error condition.
NOTES
Not checking the return value of close is a common but nevertheless
serious programming error. It is quite possible that errors on a pre-
vious write(2) operation are first reported at the final close. Not
checking the return value when closing the file may lead to silent loss
of data. This can especially be observed with NFS and disk quotas.
A successful close does not guarantee that the data has been success-
fully saved to disk, as the kernel defers writes. It is not common for
a filesystem to flush the buffers when the stream is closed. If you
need to be sure that the data is physically stored use fsync(2). (It
will depend on the disk hardware at this point.)
SEEALSO
open(2), fcntl(2), shutdown(2), unlink(2), fclose(3), fsync(2)
2001-12-13 CLOSE(2)
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