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From: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: News Install...3.0 help
Message-ID: <3041@auspex.auspex.com>
Date: 14 Mar 90 18:58:16 GMT
References: <5809.25fcb81e@jane.uh.edu>
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 26

>'can't open ~/news/lib/news/history database. errno is 9'.

Oh, good grief.  I cannot imagine somebody in this day and age writing a
UNIX program that sees fit to dump "errno" values out numerically, and not
give the text error message as well.  Really, most of us have *not*
memorized all the UNIX "errno"s, except for those we've been obliged to
memorize as a result of having them shoved at us by bogus code such as
that.

If this really is a UNIX "errno", the author of the News 3.0 "expire" is
hereby sentenced to 10 hours in purgatory reading PERROR(3), with
special attention paid to the descriptions of "sys_nerr" and
"sys_errlist"....

UNIX errno 9 is EBADF, "bad file number".  You don't get that back from
an "open"; you get it back from a call that's supposed to take the
result of an "open" as an argument but that's been handed something
that's not a valid file descriptor instead.  This may be the result of
some "open" failing and *not* being caught (another sin, even worse than
printing "errno" values as numbers) and the resulting -1 from "open"
being subsequently used as a file descriptor.

Not having the News 3.0 code handy, I've no idea what "open" is failing,
or why.  Were the code correct, you might even have gotten enough
information to fix the problem yourself....  Would the author of that
code please fix it to be correct?  Thanks.