errno 94 (EBADMSG): meaning and diagnosis

Status / error code:		Category:

Constant name:
Source:		Operating System:
Description: A received or decoded message has invalid structure or content for the protocol layer that processed it.

Could be also:
Constant	Type	OS
ESOCKTNOSUPPORT	errno	Linux
EUSERS	errno	Solaris
OBJECT_INITIALIZATION_FAILED	BugCheck Code	Windows

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ESOCKTNOSUPPORT	EUSERS

EBADMSG

Preserve the protocol context

EBADMSG indicates that a message failed validation at a protocol or framing boundary. It is not necessarily a transport failure: bytes may have arrived, but their structure, authentication material, sequence, checksum, or message format was unacceptable to the consumer.

The remedy depends on the protocol contract. Capture a bounded, redacted representation of the message, parser stage, negotiated version, and peer identity. Blindly replaying the same payload is unlikely to help and can amplify a malformed-input or compatibility problem.

What to compare

Expected versus received message length, version, type, and integrity fields.
Whether a proxy, serializer, compression layer, or character conversion changed the bytes in flight.
Nearby EPROTO events: EBADMSG focuses on an invalid message, while EPROTO is a broader protocol-state failure.

References

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