.\" Copyright (C) 1993 David Metcalfe (david@prism.demon.co.uk) .\" .\" Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this .\" manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are .\" preserved on all copies. .\" .\" Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this .\" manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the .\" entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a .\" permission notice identical to this one .\" .\" Since the Linux kernel and libraries are constantly changing, this .\" manual page may be incorrect or out-of-date. The author(s) assume no .\" responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from .\" the use of the information contained herein. The author(s) may not .\" have taken the same level of care in the production of this manual, .\" which is licensed free of charge, as they might when working .\" professionally. .\" .\" Formatted or processed versions of this manual, if unaccompanied by .\" the source, must acknowledge the copyright and authors of this work. .\" .\" References consulted: .\" Linux libc source code .\" Lewine's _POSIX Programmer's Guide_ (O'Reilly & Associates, 1991) .\" 386BSD man pages .\" Modified Sat Jul 24 18:05:30 1993 by Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu) .\" Modified Fri Feb 16 14:25:17 1996 by Andries Brouwer (aeb@cwi.nl) .\" Modified Sun Jul 21 20:55:44 1996 by Andries Brouwer (aeb@cwi.nl) .\" .TH STRERROR 3 "April 13, 1993" "GNU" "Linux Programmer's Manual" .SH NAME strerror \- return string describing error code .SH SYNOPSIS .nf .B #include .sp .BI "char *strerror(int " errnum ); .fi .SH DESCRIPTION The \fBstrerror()\fP function returns a string describing the error code passed in the argument \fIerrnum\fP. The string can only be used until the next call to \fBstrerror()\fP. .SH "RETURN VALUE" The \fBstrerror()\fP function returns the appropriate description string, or an unknown error message if the error code is unknown. .SH "CONFORMING TO" SVID 3, POSIX, BSD 4.3, ISO 9899 .SH "SEE ALSO" .BR errno "(3), " perror "(3), " strsignal (3)