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

There is a quietly pervasive myth in multi-sysadmin groups that therecan be an environment without specialists, where every sysadmin can doevery job that the group does equally well. If you do much work of anycomplexity, this idea is not just false but crazy.

I call it crazy because of what it requires. In general, it invariablytakes a significant amount of research, learning, and experimentation tobecome a (semi-)expert in a technical area such as Exim configuration,OpenBSD firewalls, ZFS,