[Tutor] Re: Exceptions vs error codes

[Alan Gauld]

> > I believe the problem is at the level of the OS open() call which
simply
> > returns an error (-1) with no distinction as to why it failed.
Thus

> Whenever anything bad happens in C standard library code, the
'errno'
> global variable is set to something useful.  It's pervasive
throughout the
> C library.  Good error reporting in C should be, in theory, as
simple as a
> call to perror().

I thought perror was a Unix thing?
It doesn't work under Windows, VMS etc?
But I've just tried it on XP and....it works!

> But this facility is also not well known to many C programmers, even
> experienced ones!

I've used perror for years on Unix but for some reason believed
it wasn't part of the C library but Unix only.

Between curses, getch and perror I'm not having a good week! :-)

Alan G.