Re: Question about adding a tiny tool into GNU coreutils

[Pádraig Brady]

On 06/01/10 20:02, Jim Meyering wrote:
> Daniel Borkmann wrote:
> > I was wondering if it's possible to add a tiny little program (next to
> > true and false ;) ) into the gnu coreutils package? The program I've
> > written is called "errno" and does nothing less than writing an error
> > string according to the user-specified error number.
> >
> > Very often, programs or kernel modules only show/log a return value, but
> > not the actual error message, so you manually have to look it up. This
> > _tiny_ tool helps doing this automatically ;)
> >
> > I think it would rather fit into the coreutils than having it's own
> > distribution package. What do you think? (Source attached)

Well it is something I often want to lookup which I do with:
strerror() { python -c "import os; print os.strerror($1)"; }

Previously I used a shell script:
http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/strerror

It's one of those marginal cases.
Because I mainly need it when developing I'd be
inclined not to include it as a separate util.
Perhaps it's something for the contrib directory
we've previously mentioned.

cheers,
Pádraig.