Apple

Ah, great stuff Cameron, I really like the way you showed the ability to put the errors in Human readable form, thanks

Yes I must be losing my mind, because I could have sworn, previously, my code was creating the new directory, but I might have just added manually at the beginning of this project and assumed it was created each time when it was not. As you might tell I am new to the Unix environment. J

Two questions is you do not mind.

1.) Does mkdir allow be to specify a multiple directory path to be installed, or do I have to do some kind of loop to install it. i.e. mkdir(“/otr/mydir”, 0755)?

2.) What is x-man-page that everyone is referring to? I know about man in a terminal but I am not familiar with the ‘x-man-page’ notation.

Thanks so much

Carl

-----Original Message-----
From: Cameron Kerr [mailto:email@hidden]
Sent: Thursday, June 30, 2005 7:12 PM
To: Carl Smith
Cc: email@hidden
Subject: Re: fopen

First of all, one of the main problems you have is that you aren't checking your errors. UNIX, unlike Mac OS, has had, for many many years, a simple way of printing out the actual error, in a way a human can easily understand. None of the "error -12345" business.

The correct way to check the return code from fopen (check the Return section of the manual-page to see how best to check for errors) is as follows.

FILE *fp;

char *filename = "xxxx";

if( (fp = fopen( filename, "w" )) == NULL ) {

perror("Could not open filename");

// either return with an error code, or exit(EXIT_FAILURE)

}

x-man-page://perror, which is part of the stdio library, will output to stderr, the string given, followed by a colon and space, and the human-readable string that relates to errno, such as "No such file or directory" (which is what you would get if errno == ENOENT)

If you want more control, you can use x-man-page://strerror

You should always check your return codes.

One other problem you have is that you're assuming a folder will be created for you, which fopen will not do.

Cameron Kerr

Telecommunications Teaching Fellow & SysAdmin

email@hidden