Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: GNU wish list
Keywords: gnu
Message-ID: <1741@auspex.auspex.com>
Date: 3 Jun 89 22:40:30 GMT
References: <649Q02pt31vt01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com>
Reply-To: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 10

>While I am on the subject of errno, why not have a perrorf(3C)?  It is
>like printf(3C) exactly except that it prints "cmdname:" as the first
>characters of the line and it has a format character for the error
>message.

Why not just implement "strerror", as per the proposed ANSI C standard,
which takes an error number as argument and returns a pointer to an
appropriate message for that error, and construct the message yourself? 
This has the advantage that if you *don't* want to just blat the error
out to the standard error, you don't have to do so....