strerror_r questions

[Eric Blake]

On 02/10/2011 02:18 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>> The "Unknown error XXX" message is a cygwin artifact, not a newlib
>> artifact.  That is, cygwin should be using it's own strerror_r, since it
>> provides its own strerror() with different behavior than newlib's.
> 
> The "Unknown error XXX" is not a Cygwin artifact, it's standard glibc
> behaviour, see `man strerror_r' on Linux:

It's actually recommended (but not required) POSIX behavior.  It's just
that it gets expensive to implement on embedded systems.

>> The glibc docs state merely that the return value is
>> NUL-terminated, not that buf is also NUL-terminated (which, for n==0, is
>> impossible).
> 
> That's not how I understand the sentence
> 
>   If the function stores a string in buf, then at most buflen bytes are
>   stored (the string may  be  truncated  if buflen  is too small) and
>   the string always includes a terminating null byte.

Glibc documentation is ambiguous - first it states that if n is too
small, then buf is not modified nor returned; then it states that if n
is too small, buf gets a truncated string.  An actual test program
proves the point:

$ cat foo.c
#define _GNU_SOURCE 1
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <errno.h>
int main (void) {
  char buf[80] = "Hello world";
  char *p = strerror_r (1, buf, 4);
  printf ("buf=%s\np=%s\n", buf, p);
  return 0;
}
$ ./foo
buf=Hello world
p=Operation not permitted

I'll be submitting a bug report to the Linux man-pages project.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake@redhat.com    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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