What does the ENT mean in ENOENT?
Shouldn't the error:
No such file or directory
just be named by ENOFILE?
Is there any story or reason?
Add a comment
|
4 Answers
It's an abbreviation of Error NO ENTry (or Error NO ENTity), and can actually be used for more than files/directories.
It's abbreviated because C compilers at the dawn of time didn't support more than 8 characters in symbols.
10 Comments
Armen Michaeli
"can actually be used for more than files/directories." -- except when you want to have your code merged into Linux: lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75
Jackson Ray Hamilton
@Someprogrammerdude’s comment explained most of my questions (qualms) about C naming conventions.
Jackson Ray Hamilton
This answer claims it can be used “for more.” What are those other things specifically?
dwelle
@Jackson such as for
command not found in node's child_process. *cries*.
caf
@Jackson:
AF_ALG sockets will return ENOENT from bind() if you attempt to bind an algorithm that doesn't exist. |
It's simply “No such directory entry”. Since directory entries can be directories or files (or symlinks, or sockets, or pipes, or devices), the name ENOFILE would have been too narrow in its meaning.
2 Comments
Guido Flohr
Symlinks, sockets, pipes, and devices are all files, and so are directories. ENOFILE would be just as wide or narrow in its meaning as ENOENT.
Steve Summit
In any case, it's safe to say that "ent" stands for the same thing in
ENOENT as it does in struct dirent.For a full list of all the codes and a better description of what each one means see errno.h This is an include file that is part of the C standard library and the comments clarify what the error is about. In this case:
#define ENOENT 2 /* No such file or directory */
1 Comment
Dror
Sigh. Here's an alternative link ibm.com/docs/en/zos/…. If hat breaks, this should always work duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=errno.h&ia=web :-)
In linux(Ubuntu)
File: /usr/include/asm-generic/errno-base.h
6: #define ENOENT 2 /* No such file or directory */
7:
https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/errno.3.html
errno 2
return:
ENOENT 2 No such file or directory
open group: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009604599/functions/xsh_chap02_03.html
[ENOENT]
No such file or directory. A component of a specified pathname does not exist, or the pathname is an empty string.
Glibc:
https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Error-Codes.html
Macro: int ENOENT
"No such file or directory." This is a “file doesn’t exist” error for ordinary files that are referenced in contexts where they areexpected to already exist.
