Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!novavax!twwells!bill
From: bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.bugs.sys5
Subject: Re: 'what' doesn't use perror to print open errors, Sys V/3.0
Message-ID: <886@twwells.uucp>
Date: 29 Apr 89 20:09:12 GMT
References: <3759@sugar.hackercorp.com> <10156@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Reply-To: bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells)
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In article <10156@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:
: In article <3759@sugar.hackercorp.com> karl@sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer) writes:
: >Several years have elapsed, which should have been long enough to make all
: >the programs distributed with Unix follow the perror() conventions that
: >the manuals tell us our programs are to follow.
:
: (1) "what" uses fopen() to open the file.  perror() is inappropriate
: except when a system call reports failure.  fopen() is not a system call.

According to the manual pages for Microport V/386 3.0e, fopen returns
an error status in errno and perror is defined to work for system
calls and library functions.

I don't have the manual pages for other systems handy, but I seem to
recall similar wording for BSD and SunOS.

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Bill                            { uunet | novavax } !twwells!bill