NAME

setkey - set encoding key (CRYPT)

SYNOPSIS

[XSI] #include <stdlib.h>

void setkey(const char *key);

DESCRIPTION

The setkey() function provides access to an implementation-defined encoding algorithm. The argument of setkey() is an array of length 64 bytes containing only the bytes with numerical value of 0 and 1. If this string is divided into groups of 8, the low-order bit in each group is ignored; this gives a 56-bit key which is used by the algorithm. This is the key that shall be used with the algorithm to encode a string block passed to encrypt().

The setkey() function shall not change the setting of errno if successful. An application wishing to check for error situations should set errno to 0 before calling setkey(). If errno is non-zero on return, an error has occurred.

The setkey() function need not be thread-safe.

RETURN VALUE

No values are returned.

ERRORS

The setkey() function shall fail if:

[ENOSYS]

The functionality is not supported on this implementation.

EXAMPLES

None.

APPLICATION USAGE

Decoding need not be implemented in all environments. This is related to government restrictions in some countries on encryption and decryption routines. Historical practice has been to ship a different version of the encryption library without the decryption feature in the routines supplied. Thus the exported version of encrypt() does encoding but not decoding.

RATIONALE

None.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

A future version of the standard may mark this interface as obsolete or remove it altogether.

SEE ALSO

crypt, encrypt

XBD <stdlib.h>

CHANGE HISTORY

First released in Issue 1. Derived from Issue 1 of the SVID.

Issue 5

The DESCRIPTION is updated to indicate that errno is not changed if the function is successful.

Issue 7

Austin Group Interpretation 1003.1-2001 #156 is applied.

POSIX.1-2008, Technical Corrigendum 2, XSH/TC2-2008/0320 [899] is applied.