Error Messages

* Unfortunately, once you start writing your own code, you will almost certainly make some mistakes and get some error messages from the compiler.

This is likely to lead to two problems: reading the messages, and understanding the messages.

Capturing the Error Messages

*Unless you are a far better programmer than I, you will not only get error messages, you will get so many that they overflow your telnet/xterm window.

How you handle this problem depends upon what command shell you are running, but there are two general approaches. You can use redirection and pipes to send the error messages somewhere more convenient or you can use programs that try to capture all output from a running program (i.e., the compiler).

*We've talked before about how many Unix commands are "filters", working from a single input stream and producing a single output stream. Actually, there are 3 standard streams in most operating systems: standard input, standard output, and standard error. These generally default to the keyboard for standard input and the screen for the other two, unless either the program or the person running the program redirects one or more of thes streams to a file or pipes the stream to / from another program.