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From: nerd@percival.UUCP (Michael Galassi)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.bugs
Subject: Re: Compress  error messages
Message-ID: <865@percival.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 28-Aug-87 03:48:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: percival.865
Posted: Fri Aug 28 03:48:29 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 30-Aug-87 06:45:17 EDT
References: <339@cbstr1.att.com> <209@ho7cad.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: nerd@percival.UUCP (Michael N. Galassi)
Organization: Percy's UNIX, Portland, OR.
Lines: 22

In article <209@ho7cad.ATT.COM> nuucp@ho7cad.ATT.COM (UUCP) writes:

>Well, I agree.  This  is pretty funny.   But don't blame compress.   A
>lot  of  programs give you  this.   Seems to be  what  you get on some
>machines when you  call "perror()" when  there ain't been no error (of
>its genre) [or  maybe when the error number  is bigger than the secret
>message array].

Most of the time I see this message seems to be the case where someone
tries to port a program to something like microport system 5 which has
no "sysexits.h".  They then run off to the closest vax runing BSD and
swipe the file from there.  All well and file except that the maping of
the error messages to the numeric codes passed as arguments to perror()
are not the same in BSD as they are in microport.  Hence the bizare
messages (fine debuging aid they make).

All of this is a theory based on having seen many an error message apear
out of context on microport in programs that like compress and RCS were
written originaly on BSD systems.  Also, my home machine is a BSD 4.2
and between it and the vax (BSD 4.3) I have never seen these messages
and these are the machines where I spend most of my time.
-michael