The Art of Debugging with GDB, DDD, and Eclipse

Error Reporting in C

Error reporting in C is accomplished through the use of an old mechanism named errno. Although errno shows its age and has some deficiencies, it generally gets the job done. You may wonder why you need an error-reporting mechanism at all, since most C functions have a handy return value that tells whether the call succeeded or failed. The answer is that a return value can warn you that a function didn't do what you wanted it to, but it may or may not tell you why. To make this more concrete, consider this code snippet:

FILE *fp
fp = fopen("myfile.dat", "r");
retval = fwrite(&data, sizeof(DataStruct), 1, fp);

Suppose you inspect retval and find it to be zero. From the man page, you see that fwrite() should return the ...