A bug? in the perror man page

A bug? in the perror man page

[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[]."

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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Re: A bug? in the perror man page

[Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)]

Hello Jesus,

On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 11:36 PM, jesus.otero <jesus.otero-zg5kjA6Mr10@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 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?

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

Thanks,

Michael


-- 
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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