Question

So I have a school project that uses error(). However I’m on a Windows machine and Visual Studio doesn’t appear to support the error() function. Since it’s nearly impossible to search on Google for “error()”. I was wondering exactly what this function does and if there is a compiler flag to enable error() support on Visual Studio (2010).

static void *
check_nonnull (void *p)
{
  if (! p)
    error (1, errno, "memory exhausted");
  return p;
}

Answer 1

The error function is a GNU extension and is not available on Visual Studio.

Its behaviour is described in the man page here: http://linux.die.net/man/3/error

It shouldn’t be difficult to write your own version (even easier if you don’t care about emulating every detail). You’ll need the strerror function, which is available in VS.