socket() return -1 but errno 0

Question

I tried to create a UDP socket on mingw, but socket() returns -1, with errno = 0. Strange. I have included winsock2.h. Initially I had compilation error undefined reference to socket@12, after setting -lws2_32 and -lwsock32 to Linker Settings of Code::Block, compilation success.

sockfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, 0);
RDF_LOG(kDEBUG, "sockfd %d ", sockfd);
if (sockfd < 0){
    RDF_LOG(kERROR, "ERROR: %s , errno %d\n", strerror(errno), errno);
}

Result --> sockfd -1 ERROR: No error , errno 0

---

OK, I change RDF_LOG to fprintf instead.

int tmp = 0;

sockfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, 0);
tmp = errno;
fprintf(stderr, "sockfd %d ", sockfd);
if (sockfd < 0){
    fprintf(stderr, "socket: %s , errno %d\n", strerror(tmp), tmp);
}

The result returned is, still, --> sockfd -1 socket: No error , errno 0 Is it possible that mingw does not support errno??

Answer 1

The first thing I would do is this:

sockfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, 0);
int tmp = errno;
RDF_LOG(kDEBUG, "sockfd %d ", sockfd);
if (sockfd < 0){
    RDF_LOG(kERROR, "ERROR: %s , errno %d\n", strerror(tmp), tmp);
}

I have no idea what RDF_LOG may be doing to the errno variable and this will tell you whether it changes it or not.

Another thing to look for is that you have successfully performed your WSAStartup. The following minimal program should hopefully show you how to do this, and provide a starting point for debugging:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <winsock2.h>

int main (void) {
    WSADATA wsaData;
    int listenFd;

    if (WSAStartup(MAKEWORD(1,1), &wsaData) == SOCKET_ERROR) {
        printf ("Error initialising WSA.\n");
        return -1;
    }

    listenFd = socket (AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
    if (listenFd  < 0) {
        printf ("Error %d opening socket.\n", errno);
        return -1;
    }

    return 0;
}