Re: Is there a way to get "EINVAL" style string

[Jon Grant <jg@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi Michael

On 22/04/12 22:25, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
> Hi Jon,
>
> On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 11:14 PM, Jon Grant<jg@xxxxxxxx>  wrote:
> > Hello
> >
> > I was looking at the man pages looking for a way to get a string of the
> > errno value meaning. This is kind of a user question.
> >
> > This API returns "returns a pointer to a string that describes the error
> > code":
> >
> > http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/strerror.3.html
> >
> > However, this is a description, e.g. "Invalid argument".  Is there a
> > function that would return "EINVAL" or "ENOENT" as the string?
>
> None that I know of. (In passing, I dealt with exactly this problem
> for my book with a script that generated the string names; see
> http://man7.org/tlpi/code/online/dist/lib/ename.c.inc.html and
> http://man7.org/tlpi/code/online/dist/lib/error_functions.c.html)

Interesting. I saw on the ename.c page that the numbers were in the 
table hard coded -- is it guaranteed that 90 will always correspond to 
EPROTOTYPE on a unixy system?

> > Could I suggest that the text on the man page be updated to clarify what
> > would be returned:
> >
> > "returns a pointer to a string that describes the error code. e.g. "Invalid
> > argument" if EINVAL was the errnum."
>
> Done for 3.40.

Great, thank you!
Jon
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