As a sysadmin, I have developed strong and quite fixed opinions abouthow Unix programs should format their error messages for maximum usefulreadability by harried sysadmins. Today I feel like boiling it down towhat I will grandly call the standard format Unix error message, whichis the format you should use unless you have a really good reason to dootherwise.

The standard format message should be written to standard error, andlooks like:

program: general problem: specific error message

A typical example would be:

mycat: cannot open