Revision 4678663a5146bb2ba8f75ac1c75632557176dd5d

[Mark Doliner]

On Sat, 24 Feb 2007 15:56:59 -0500, Evan Schoenberg wrote
> On Feb 24, 2007, at 3:25 PM, markdoliner at pidgin.im wrote:
> 
> > Evan, was this line necessary?  It causes the following warning
> > for me when compiling:
> >
> > eventloop.c: In function 'gaim_input_get_error':
> > eventloop.c:70: warning: ISO C90 forbids mixed declarations and code
> 
> I included it not because I'd seen a need but rather because the  
> usage for errno in the page I found via Google  [1]  when I was  
> trying to figure out why errno is used the way it is in proxy.c says:
> "An application that needs to examine the value of errno to 
> determine  the error should set it to 0 before a function call, then 
> inspect it  before a subsequent function call."
> 
> I see no reason errno needs to be used at all, though, as getsockopt 
> () returns the value directly into the pointer we pass.
> 
> [1] http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/errno.html
> 
> -Evan

For most functions that deal with errno, the function will set errno to the
error number AND return non-zero (or something similar).  So usually you can
just say, "Oh, this function returned non-zero, therefore something went wrong
and I should look at errno to figure out what happened."

There are a few functions that aren't able to signal an error based on just
the return value, so for those functions it's necessary to set errno to 0
before calling them, and then check if errno != 0 afterwards.  readdir() is
the only one I can think of.

-Mark