As @Sean said, fcntl() is largely standardized, and therefore available across platforms. The ioctl() function predates fcntl() in Unix, but is not standardized at all. That the ioctl() worked for you across all the platforms of relevance to you is fortunate, but not guaranteed. In particular, the names used for the second argument are arcane and not reliable across platforms. Indeed, they are often unique to the particular device driver that the file descriptor references. (The ioctl() calls used for a bit-mapped graphics device running on an ICL Perq running PNX (Perq Unix) of twenty years ago never translated to anything else anywhere else, for example.)