Re: Is there a way to get "EINVAL" style string

["Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" <mtk.manpages-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

Hi Jon,

On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 11:14 PM, Jon Grant <jg-hus3n9K41k0@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Hello
>
> I was looking at the man pages looking for a way to get a string of the
> errno value meaning. This is kind of a user question.
>
> This API returns "returns a pointer to a string that describes the error
> code":
>
> http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/strerror.3.html
>
> However, this is a description, e.g. "Invalid argument".  Is there a
> function that would return "EINVAL" or "ENOENT" as the string?

None that I know of. (In passing, I dealt with exactly this problem
for my book with a script that generated the string names; see
http://man7.org/tlpi/code/online/dist/lib/ename.c.inc.html and
http://man7.org/tlpi/code/online/dist/lib/error_functions.c.html)

> Could I suggest that the text on the man page be updated to clarify what
> would be returned:
>
> "returns a pointer to a string that describes the error code. e.g. "Invalid
> argument" if EINVAL was the errnum."

Done for 3.40.

Cheers,

Michael



-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Author of "The Linux Programming Interface"; http://man7.org/tlpi/
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