NAME
perror
, strerror
,
strerror_l
, strerror_r
,
sys_errlist
, sys_nerr
— system error
messages
LIBRARY
library “libc”
SYNOPSIS
#include
<stdio.h>
void
perror
(const
char *string);
extern const char * const sys_errlist[];
extern const int sys_nerr;
#include
<string.h>
char *
strerror
(int
errnum);
char *
strerror_l
(int
errnum,
locale_t);
int
strerror_r
(int
errnum, char
*strerrbuf, size_t
buflen);
DESCRIPTION
Thestrerror
(),
strerror_l
(), strerror_r
(),
and perror
() functions look up the error message
string corresponding to an error number.
The
strerror
()
function accepts an error number argument errnum and
returns a pointer to the corresponding message string in the current locale.
strerror
() is not thread-safe. It returns a pointer
to an internal static buffer that could be overwritten by a
strerror
() call from another thread.
The
strerror_l
()
function accepts errnum error number and
locale locale handle arguments and returns a pointer
to a string corresponding to the specified error in the given locale.
strerror_l
() is thread-safe, its result can be only
overwritten by another call to strerror_l
() from the
current thread.
The
strerror_r
()
function renders the same result into strerrbuf for a
maximum of buflen characters and returns 0 upon
success.
The
perror
()
function finds the error message corresponding to the current value of the
global variable errno
(intro(2)) and writes it, followed by a newline, to the standard error
file descriptor. If the argument string is
non-NULL
and does not point to the null character,
this string is prepended to the message string and separated from it by a
colon and space (“:
”);
otherwise, only the error message string is printed.
If the error number is not recognized, these
functions return an error message string containing
“Unknown error:
” followed by
the error number in decimal. The
strerror
()
and strerror_r
() functions return
EINVAL
as a warning. Error numbers recognized by
this implementation fall in the range 0 < errnum
< sys_nerr. The number 0 is also recognized,
although applications that take advantage of this are likely to use
unspecified values of errno.
If insufficient storage is provided in
strerrbuf (as specified in
buflen) to contain the error string,
strerror_r
()
returns ERANGE
and strerrbuf
will contain an error message that has been truncated and
NUL
terminated to fit the length specified by
buflen.
The message strings can be accessed directly using
the external array sys_errlist. The external value
sys_nerr contains a count of the messages in
sys_errlist. The use of these variables is deprecated;
strerror
(),
strerror_l
(), or
strerror_r
() should be used instead.
EXAMPLES
The following example shows how to use
perror
() to report an error.
#include <fcntl.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> int main(void) { int fd; if ((fd = open("/nonexistent", O_RDONLY)) == -1) { perror("open()"); exit(1); } printf("File descriptor: %d\n", fd); return (0); }
When executed, the program will print an error message along the
lines of ‘open(): No such file or
directory
’.
SEE ALSO
STANDARDS
The perror
() and
strerror
() functions conform to
ISO/IEC 9899:1999 (“ISO C99”).
The strerror_r
() function conforms to
IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (“POSIX.1”). The
strerror_l
() function conforms to
IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (“POSIX.1”).
HISTORY
The strerror
() and
perror
() functions first appeared in
4.4BSD. The strerror_r
()
function was implemented in FreeBSD 4.4 by
Wes Peters
<wes@FreeBSD.org>. The
strerror_l
() function was added in
FreeBSD 13.0.
BUGS
The strerror
() function returns its result
in a static buffer which will be overwritten by subsequent calls.
Programs that use the deprecated sys_errlist variable often fail to compile because they declare it inconsistently. Size of the sys_errlist object might increase during FreeBSD lifetime, breaking some ABI stability guarantees.