iostat

[Erik Edelmann]

On Tue, Aug 22, 2006 at 04:09:38PM -0700, Steve Kargl wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 22, 2006 at 02:52:39PM -0700, Richard E Maine wrote:
> > I would personally agree with Daniel here that the numbers "should"  
> > be distinguishable.... for an appropriate sense of "should." In  
> > particular, that's for the sense of "I think it should be that way  
> > for user convenience" as opposed to the sense of being a requirement  
> > of the standard. The standard itself reserves the word "should" for  
> > its few recommendations as opposed to requirements. I use it in that  
> > same sense. I recommend this, but it isn't a requirement.
> 
> Unfortunately, gfortran runs on more than just a few operating 
> systems.  While open(2) on many Unix-like system probably returns
> ENOENT, EACCESS, etc., we would need to determine the corresponding
> errors on all supported OS's.  (FreeBSD's open(2) returns 21 unique
> error codes where some of the error codes can mean more than one thing
> depending on how open(2) is invoked)  For example, MS Window does not have
> the same level of file access permissions as Unix, but it does have
> hidden files.  So, gfortran would probably need a large message database.

What about assigning the value of errno to iostat, and then if the user
wants to know what an error code means on his system, he can do
something like


#include <stdio.h>
int main () { puts(strerror(<the error code>)); return 0; }


It requires some basic C knowledge of course, so it's not an ideal
solution, but if someone is desperate enough, it's still doable.


        Erik