[Bug 612267] [NEW] [WISHLIST] Provide a utility that interprets POSIX errno's

[Dustin Kirkland]

Public bug reported:

Many a kernel or systems programmer will recall debugging some code and
trying to interpret the returned error number.

This is quite easy to do programmatically in any one of a number of
ways.  It would be really simple and incredibly useful to bundle one of
these and drop it into /usr/bin/errno on Ubuntu systems, such that users
could run "errno 36", or "errno EPERM" and have the utility interpret
common POSIX error numbers.

There are a number of ways that this can be done.  Perhaps easiest is
grepping /usr/include/asm-generic/errno*.h (which is why this bug is
filed against the linux-meta package).  I'll attach a shell script that
does this.

Alternatively, perl and python could be used to do this too (courtesy of Kees Cook):
 perl -MPOSIX -e 'print strerror('$1'),"\n";'
or
 python -c 'import os;print os.strerror('$1');'

This is a wishlist bug that we upload one of these solutions to
/usr/bin.  If I could get a +1 from a member of the Ubuntu kernel team,
I'll gladly commit a fix.

** Affects: linux-meta (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Wishlist
     Assignee: Dustin Kirkland (kirkland)
         Status: Triaged

** Changed in: linux-meta (Ubuntu)
   Importance: Undecided => Wishlist

** Changed in: linux-meta (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => Triaged

** Changed in: linux-meta (Ubuntu)
    Milestone: None => ubuntu-10.10-beta

** Changed in: linux-meta (Ubuntu)
     Assignee: (unassigned) => Dustin Kirkland (kirkland)

-- 
[WISHLIST] Provide a utility that interprets POSIX errno's
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/612267
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