Standard Error Reporting

Common programs like gcc, rm, cp etc. seem to follow a pattern in reporting their errors like this:

program: error

For instance:

$ gc开发者_如何学编程c
gcc: no input files

Is there some standard function or macro I should call from within my own C programs to report errors in a standard fashion?

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There are no macros (that I know of). But, here's the relevant standard for formatting error output.

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If you're not aware of perror and strerror (etc.), they're worth knowing about. They're not universal by any means, but can be helpful under at least some circumstances.

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It dates back to the earliest days of Unix programming. It was always a recommendation that error messages be prefixed by the name of the command generating them, not least so that if errors occur in a pipeline of commands, you can tell which of the various commands generated the error message. You can see the style in K&R 1st Edition, in some of the example programs (not quite all), and also in 'Software Tools' by Kernighan & Plauger, and in 'The UNIX Programming Environment' by Kernighan & Pike.

There are no completely standard tools - functions or macros - for such error messages. (I have an extensive and comprehensive set of error reporting functions that do print the program name ahead of the message.)