Question

can you set SO_RCVTIMEO and SO_SNDTIMEO socket options in boost asio?

If so how?

Note I know you can use timers instead, but I’d like to know about these socket options in particular.

Answer 1

Absolutely! Boost ASIO allows you to access the native/underlying data, which in this case is the SOCKET itself. So, let’s say you have:

boost::asio::ip::tcp::socket my_socket; 

And let’s say you’ve already called open or bind or some member function that actually makes my_socket usable. Then, to get the underlying SOCKET value, call:

SOCKET native_sock = my_socket.native(); int result = SOCKET_ERROR;  if (INVALID_SOCKET != native_sock) {     result = setsockopt(native_sock, SOL_SOCKET, <the pertinent params you want to use>); } 

So there you have it! Boost’s ASIO lets you do many things more quickly than you otherwise might be able to, but there are a lot of things you still need the normal socket library calls for. This happens to be one of them.