moreutils: an 'errno' utility

[Dustin Kirkland]

This time, script attached.

On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 9:28 AM, Dustin Kirkland <kirkland at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 6:58 AM, Joey Hess <joey at kitenet.net> wrote:
>> Dustin Kirkland wrote:
>>> I have contributed a small utility (and manpage) called "errno" to
>>> Debian/Ubuntu's ubuntu-dev-tools package.  Several people have
>>> suggested [1] that this utility might have a better home in your
>>> moreutils project.  I didn't originally submit it to moreutils because
>>> most of those tools appear to do their work on stdin.
>>
>> That is not a criteria for moreutils; doing something generally useful that
>> cannot be accomplished with standard unix tools is the only criteria.
>
> Cool, thanks for the clarification.
>
>>> In any case, it's a ~10 line shell script that takes one or more
>>> strings on the command line, and looks for a matching POSIX error
>>> codes, error names, or error descriptions.  It's useful, as a
>>> developer on a command line, to work your way to and from error tuples
>>> of codes/names/descriptions.  People have suggested rewriting it in
>>> Python, which can be done easily.  And many, many people have written
>>> their own grep hacks to do the same [2].
>>
>> This is a good idea, but the implementation leaves something to be
>> desired, since it requires gcc and libc headers.
>>
>> Couldn't a C program use sys_errlist[]? (see perror(3))
>
> Almost, but not trivially with complete feature parity.  The current
> "grep" implementation allows searching on any of the 3-tuple, of an
> error code's [number, name, description].
>
> The updated, attached script opportunistically uses gcc, but does not
> require it, as it falls back to using the
> /usr/include/asm-generic/errno*.h headers.
>
> Perhaps this version is acceptable to you.  If not, no big deal -- it
> has been added to the ubuntu-dev-tools package for now (until it finds
> a better home), so I'm happy.  Thanks.
>
> Cheers,
> :-Dustin
>



-- 
:-Dustin
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