How to get error message when ifstream open fails

Question

ifstream f;
f.open(fileName);

if ( f.fail() )
{
    // I need error message here, like "File not found" etc. -
    // the reason of the failure
}

How to get error message as string?

Answer 1

Every system call that fails update the errno value.

Thus, you can have more information about what happens when a ifstream open fails by using something like :

cerr << "Error: " << strerror(errno);

---

However, since every system call updates the global errno value, you may have issues in a multithreaded application, if another system call triggers an error between the execution of the f.open and use of errno.

On system with POSIX standard:

errno is thread-local; setting it in one thread does not affect its value in any other thread.

---

Edit (thanks to Arne Mertz and other people in the comments):

e.what() seemed at first to be a more C++-idiomatically correct way of implementing this, however the string returned by this function is implementation-dependant and (at least in G++'s libstdc++) this string has no useful information about the reason behind the error...