Hello Jonny, On 5/30/20 12:16 AM, Jonny Grant wrote: > Good evening > > Quoting part of the syscall man page: > > RETURN VALUE > The return value is defined by the system call being invoked. In gen‐ > eral, a 0 return value indicates success. A -1 return value indicates > an error, and an error code is stored in errno. > > > The last sentence doesn't quite sound right in English, and > different from other man pages eg closedir. I would propose > updating it to be :- > > "On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set appropriately" The thing is, syscall() different from your average system call or library function, so I think it's not unreasonable that the wording is somewhat different. That said, I applied the patch below. Cheers, Michael diff --git a/man2/syscall.2 b/man2/syscall.2 index 2fd94db53..382c40b22 100644 --- a/man2/syscall.2 +++ b/man2/syscall.2 @@ -82,9 +82,8 @@ when invoking a system call that has no wrapper function in the C library. .BR syscall () saves CPU registers before making the system call, restores the registers upon return from the system call, -and stores any error code returned by the system call in -.BR errno (3) -if an error occurs. +and stores any error returned by the system call in +.BR errno (3). .PP Symbolic constants for system call numbers can be found in the header file .IR <sys/syscall.h> . @@ -92,7 +91,7 @@ Symbolic constants for system call numbers can be found in the header file The return value is defined by the system call being invoked. In general, a 0 return value indicates success. A \-1 return value indicates an error, -and an error code is stored in +and an error number is stored in .IR errno . .SH NOTES .BR syscall () -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/
