Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: redirecting output Message-ID: <1990Jul3.171151.6137@zoo.toronto.edu> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <22931@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <1990Jun29.172429.2818@zoo.toronto.edu> Date: Tue, 3 Jul 90 17:11:51 GMT In article peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes: >While picking nits, how about doing it right. There's really no excuse for >not calling perror... Yes there is: it doesn't do what I want, which is a more informative message about the high-level nature of the problem. A major reason why perror() doesn't get used is that it is simply too inflexible: it takes too much extra work to put together a useful message, since that generally requires assembling an argument string out of pieces. One often wants more information than just the filename and the error code. Something like the Kernighan&Pike error() function is vastly more useful, but alas, not everyone has it. If you're willing to rely on ANSI C facilities (or imitations of same, e.g. my old strings package), then strerror() can be used to get much the same effect. -- "Either NFS must be scrapped or NFS | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology must be changed." -John K. Ousterhout | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry