perror.pl

At work I learned about a tool called perror, that showed the literal string corresponding to a numeric UNIX error. So if you get a message from a program that says "errno 13", you can run perror to easily translate that into "Permission denied". When I went to install it at home, I found out that it's in Debian package mysql-server (!). So I made my own version:

foreach (grep /^\d+$/, @ARGV) {
  $! = $_;
  print "$_: $!";
}
[download]

Which can be turned into a oneliner:

$ perl -le'print "$_: ", $! = $_ foreach grep /^\d+$/, @ARGV' 13 20   
+## It even respects your locale settings
13: Permiso denegado
20: No es un directorio
[download]

--
David Serrano

Comment on perror.pl Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: perror.pl by samtregar (Abbot) on Jul 05, 2006 at 17:20 UTC
Why the grep? I'd write that: `perl -le 'print "$_: " . ($! = $_) for @ARGV' 13 20` -sam	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: perror.pl by Hue-Bond (Priest) on Jul 05, 2006 at 18:33 UTC
My actual program has some useless lines before the ones I posted, along the lines of `use warnings; use strict;` (yes, I use them always). Under that conditions: `$ perl -Mstrict -wle 'print "$_: " . ($! = $_) for @ARGV' 13 20 invali +d 13: Permiso denegado 20: No es un directorio Argument "invalid" isn't numeric in scalar assignment at -e line 1. invalid:` [download] In fact, even with the `grep`, a bug remains where the parameter `0` is supplied. I didn't bother fixing it. -- David Serrano	[reply] [d/l]