Messages can be printed to standard error and/or to the console. To
select the destination the programmer can use the following two values,
bitwise OR combined if wanted, for the classification parameter of
fmtmsg
:
MM_PRINT
MM_CONSOLE
The erroneous piece of the system can be signalled by exactly one of the
following values which also is bitwise ORed with the
classification parameter to fmtmsg
:
MM_HARD
MM_SOFT
MM_FIRM
A third component of the classification parameter to fmtmsg
can describe the part of the system which detects the problem. This is
done by using exactly one of the following values:
MM_APPL
MM_UTIL
MM_OPSYS
A last component of classification can signal the results of this message. Exactly one of the following values can be used:
MM_RECOVER
MM_NRECOV
Each of the parameters can be a special value which means this value is to be omitted. The symbolic names for these values are:
MM_NULLLBL
MM_NULLSEV
MM_NULLMC
MM_NULLTXT
MM_NULLACT
MM_NULLTAG
There is another way certain fields can be omitted from the output to standard error. This is described below in the description of environment variables influencing the behaviour.
The severity parameter can have one of the values in the following table:
MM_NOSEV
MM_NULLSEV
.
MM_HALT
HALT
.
MM_ERROR
ERROR
.
MM_WARNING
WARNING
.
MM_INFO
INFO
.
The numeric value of these five macros are between 0
and
4
. Using the environment variable SEV_LEVEL
or using the
addseverity
function one can add more severity levels with their
corresponding string to print. This is described below
(see section Adding Severity Classes).
If no parameter is ignored the output looks like this:
label: severity-string: text TO FIX: action tag
The colons, new line characters and the TO FIX
string are
inserted if necessary, i.e., if the corresponding parameter is not
ignored.
This function is specified in the X/Open Portability Guide. It is also available on all systems derived from System V.
The function returns the value MM_OK
if no error occurred. If
only the printing to standard error failed, it returns MM_NOMSG
.
If printing to the console fails, it returns MM_NOCON
. If
nothing is printed MM_NOTOK
is returned. Among situations where
all outputs fail this last value is also returned if a parameter value
is incorrect.
There are two environment variables which influence the behaviour of
fmtmsg
. The first is MSGVERB
. It is used to control the
output actually happening on standard error (not the console
output). Each of the five fields can explicitly be enabled. To do
this the user has to put the MSGVERB
variable with a format like
the following in the environment before calling the fmtmsg
function
the first time:
MSGVERB=keyword[:keyword[:...]]
Valid keywords are label
, severity
, text
,
action
, and tag
. If the environment variable is not given
or is the empty string, a not supported keyword is given or the value is
somehow else invalid, no part of the message is masked out.
The second environment variable which influences the behaviour of
fmtmsg
is SEV_LEVEL
. This variable and the change in the
behaviour of fmtmsg
is not specified in the X/Open Portability
Guide. It is available in System V systems, though. It can be used to
introduce new severity levels. By default, only the five severity levels
described above are available. Any other numeric value would make
fmtmsg
print nothing.
If the user puts SEV_LEVEL
with a format like
SEV_LEVEL=[description[:description[:...]]]
in the environment of the process before the first call to
fmtmsg
, where description has a value of the form
severity-keyword,level,printstring
The severity-keyword part is not used by fmtmsg
but it has
to be present. The level part is a string representation of a
number. The numeric value must be a number greater than 4. This value
must be used in the severity parameter of fmtmsg
to select
this class. It is not possible to overwrite any of the predefined
classes. The printstring is the string printed when a message of
this class is processed by fmtmsg
(see above, fmtsmg
does
not print the numeric value but instead the string representation).
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