Editing Berkeley sockets (section)

===accept===
When an application is listening for stream-oriented connections from other hosts, it is notified of such events (cf. [[Select (Unix)|select()]] function) and must initialize the connection using function ''accept()''. It creates a new socket for each connection and removes the connection from the listening queue. The function has the following arguments:
* <var>sockfd</var>, the descriptor of the listening socket that has the connection queued.
* <var>cliaddr</var>, a pointer to a sockaddr structure to receive  the client's address information.
* <var>addrlen</var>, a pointer to a ''socklen_t'' location that specifies the size of the client address structure passed to accept(). When ''accept()'' returns, this location contains the size (in bytes) of the  structure.

''accept()'' returns the new socket descriptor for the accepted connection, or the value ''-1'' if an error occurs. All further communication with the remote host now occurs via this new socket.

Datagram sockets do not require processing by accept() since the receiver may immediately respond to the request using the listening socket.