What's the meaning of the %m formatting specifier?
CPrintfGlibcErrnoFormat SpecifiersC Problem Overview
The output for this code printed out ‘Success’.
printf("%m\n");
C Solutions
Solution 1 - C
m
conversion specifier is not C but is a GNU extension to printf
:
From GNU documentation:
http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Other-Output-Conversions.html
>The ‘%m’ conversion prints the string corresponding to the error code in errno. See Error Messages. Thus:
>
> fprintf (stderr, "can't open %s': %m\n", filename); > >is equivalent to: > > fprintf (stderr, "can't open
%s': %s\n", filename, strerror (errno));
>The ‘%m’ conversion is a GNU C Library extension.
So:
printf("%m\n", d);
is equivalent to
printf("%s\n", strerror (errno), d);
which is equivalent to
printf("%s\n", strerror (errno));
Note that %m
does not require an argument. Here printf("%m\n", d)
and printf("%s\n", strerror (errno), d)
have more arguments than required: with printf
if there are extra trailing arguments, they are just evaluated and ignored.
Solution 2 - C
Actually, the manual of printf() concerning %m is quite laconic:
m (Glibc extension; supported by uClibc and musl.) Print output
of strerror(errno). No argument is required.
But strerror()
has a problem in multi-threaded programs: it is not reentrant. The thread-safe version is strerror_r().
A little study of the GLIBC implementation shows that %m is actually equivalent to strerror_r(). Hence %m is thread-safe!