UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have studied some C on and off but that is it. Are Logging Events and "Events as in OOP the same? Are those what are being sent to a log file? Interactions between OOP objects?

An "event" isn't a thing the way, say, a variable is. It's a generic term. What it means in this context pretty much depends on who's asking it why. Is there a book you're following or something?

Lets go back to your code of . How would I know if an error occurred? How is an Error Determined?

This is getting very philosophical. An error isn't a 'thing'. An error is when you tried to do something and couldn't. Is it trying to open a file? If it can't, that's an error. Is it trying to write data to a socket? If it can't, that's an error. It can also be when you find unexpected conditions, like a NULL pointer that ought to not be null. And so on.

What are you actually trying to do?

Lets say I'm trying to write to a file and the operation of doing this fails. Wouldn't I have to write additional code to make sure every outcome of my code was successful ,make sure data was written to the said file? If an error is not checked the application will just go on running code. An error is only an error if it is defined as one, otherwise the CPU continues running the code with erroneous data.

An analogy would be checking a simple mathematical addition equation by subtracting one of the addends from the sum to see if the other addend was left. If this check is not made we are not aware of the error and computations using this faulty data continue.


This webpage gives my original post some structure http://wiki.webratio.com/index.php/Debugging_with_application's_logs

I got to this topic indirectly from ELF files so that won't help much. Let's say I'm writing an application and think it will be useful to have some log files to view so when it crashes I will have a clue of what to look at to solve the problems the application is experiencing.

If you're not making sure every call is successful, how do you know any of them were? You should be checking everything anyway. If you're not in the habit of doing so, there's no time like the present.

You can also view some things from the outside with a system utility like strace.

So is about one half of a applications code there just to make sure that the other one half actually worked?