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A bug? in the perror man page

DISCUSSION jesus.otero 2 participants 2 messages Mar 9, 2012 – Apr 15, 2012 Man-pages: manual pages for Linux -- Sections 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7

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jesus.otero

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#0 lore raw

Hi!

Not sure if this is a bug, but, just in case...

When searching how to print error messages without using perror, the man page of perror says

"The global error list sys_errlist[] indexed by errno can be used to obtain the error message without the newline. The largest message number provided in the table is sys_nerr -1. Be careful when directly accessing this list because new error values may not have been added to sys_errlist[]."

Searching for sys_errlist on the kernel includes pointed me to the file <bits/sys_errlist.h> where it says that sys_errlist[] is deprecated, recommending you to use strerror. Doing a google search confirm me this.

Shouldn't this be reflected on perror's man page?

I'm running an Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS
My kernel version 2.6.32-39-generic-pae
I've installed the man page for perror version 3.23-1

Thanks

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#1 lore raw

Hello Jesus,

Quoted 12 lines · jesus.otero

Hi!

Not sure if this is a bug, but, just in case...

When searching how to print error messages without using perror, the man page of perror says

"The  global error list sys_errlist[] indexed by errno can be used to obtain the error message without the newline. The largest message number provided in the table is sys_nerr -1.  Be careful when  directly  accessing  this  list because new error values may not have been added to sys_errlist[]."

Quoted 5 lines

Searching for sys_errlist on the kernel includes pointed me to the file <bits/sys_errlist.h> where it says that sys_errlist[] is deprecated, recommending you to use strerror. Doing a google search confirm me this.

Shouldn't this be reflected on perror's man page?

Yes, I think you're right. I added the sentence "The use of sys_errlist[] is nowadays deprecated." to the man page.

Thanks,

Michael

Signature · 7 lines
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Author of "The Linux Programming Interface"; http://man7.org/tlpi/
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