Matthias Friedrich's Blog

Simple Error Handling in C

Currently I've got the pleasure to do some coding in C. There's nothing wrong with that, but things can get a bit uncomfortable for those spoilt by languages like Python or Java. So it's nice to have a library of useful functions from various areas, which I accumulated over the years.

One of them is err_quit(). It provides a convenient way to exit the program after printing an error message, a pattern often used in command line tools. The function supports a format string and a variable number of arguments, just like the printf(3) family of functions. And the best thing: It's all ANSI C compliant.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdarg.h>

void err_quit(const char *fmt, ...) {
        va_list ap;
        va_start(ap, fmt);

        vfprintf(stderr, fmt, ap);

        va_end(ap);

        exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}

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