This document is a Mac OS X manual page. Manual pages are a command-line technology for providing documentation. You can view these manual pages locally using the man(1) command. These manual pages come from many different sources, and thus, have a variety of writing styles.

This manual page is associated with the Mac OS X developer tools. The software or headers described may not be present on your Mac OS X installation until you install the developer tools package. This package is available on your Mac OS X installation DVD, and the latest versions can be downloaded from developer.apple.com.

For more information about the manual page format, see the manual page for manpages(5).

REVOKE(2)                   BSD System Calls Manual                  REVOKE(2)

NAME
     revoke -- revoke file access

SYNOPSIS
     #include <unistd.h>

     int
     revoke(const char *path);

DESCRIPTION
     The revoke function invalidates all current open file descriptors in the system for the file named by
     path.  Subsequent operations on any such descriptors fail, with the exceptions that a read() from a
     character device file which has been revoked returns a count of zero (end of file), and a close() call
     will succeed.  If the file is a special file for a device which is open, the device close function is
     called as if all open references to the file had been closed.

     Access to a file may be revoked only by its owner or the super user.  The revoke function is currently
     supported only for block and character special device files.  It is normally used to prepare a terminal
     device for a new login session, preventing any access by a previous user of the terminal.

RETURN VALUES
     A 0 value indicated that the call succeeded.  A -1 return value indicates an error occurred and errno
     is set to indicated the reason.

ERRORS
     Access to the named file is revoked unless one of the following:

     [ENOTDIR]          A component of the path prefix is not a directory.

     [ENAMETOOLONG]     A component of a pathname exceeded 255 characters, or an entire path name exceeded
                        1024 characters.

     [ENOENT]           The named file or a component of the path name does not exist.

     [EACCES]           Search permission is denied for a component of the path prefix.

     [ELOOP]            Too many symbolic links were encountered in translating the pathname.

     [EFAULT]           Path points outside the process's allocated address space.

     [EINVAL]           The named file is neither a character special or block special file.

     [EPERM]            The caller is neither the owner of the file nor the super user.

SEE ALSO
     close(2)

HISTORY
     The revoke function was introduced in 4.3BSD-Reno.

BSD                              June 4, 1993                              BSD