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Asked: 2026-06-09T05:53:48+00:00

Answering another question , I stumbled upon the man page of a function called

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Answering another question, I stumbled upon the man page of a function called herror. It appears to be very much like perror except it prints errors related to some host lookup problem. The man page states that this function is “obsolete”. A function hsterror which could be used to turn the error number into a string without printing it is marked obsolete as well.

What I don’t see is any indication as to why either of them is obsolete, and what replacement should be used instead. So what is the preferred way to turn an obscure h_errno error number into a user-readable string on a GNU libc linux system? Should every tiny application ship a translation table of its own, and hope that the set of possible error codes doesn’t change any time soon?

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  1. Editorial Team

    They are obsolete because gethostbyname* is obsolete. Use getaddrinfo instead, and use gai_strerror for errors.

    From the gethostbyname(3) man page:

    The gethostbyname*() and gethostbyaddr*() functions are obsolete. Applications should use getaddrinfo(3) and getnameinfo(3) instead.

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