A Discipline of Error Handling

In the UNIX world, exception handling mechanisms for error handling are often discussed, but seldom applied. This paper describes a disciplined approach to error handling that was refined over a 3-year period during the development of a medium-large (200K line) toolkit written in C under UNIX. We describe both a portable exception handing system, written in C, and a methodology for using it which encompasses coding style, doCumentation, and testing issues.