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Proper error detection and recovery is often ignored by UNIX developers. The lack of exceptions from the C language and the rudimentary error mechanisms from the standard C library certainly contribute to this. This article familiarizes you with the UNIX standard error reporting mechanism, the errno global variable. You'll also learn about a couple of associated global variables ( sys_nerr and sys_errlist) and the standard functions that help you report errors to the user and (hopefully) encourages you to report and handle errors in a user-friendly way.