> That’s changing the subject Mmm. Now that I re-read my original comment, it does look like this. But my main point that I wanted to make was "since error fro

> That’s changing the subject Mmm. Now that I re-read my original comment, it does look like this. But my main point that I wanted to make was "since error from printf() is (almost always) unrecoverable, there is no much point in checking for it, you can't really do anything useful with it, so why do posts that chastise people for not checking it keep getting written?" And the main reason for a printf() error, in my experience, is indeed the "broken" device which is usually a network socket/pipe or, rarer, a file on a network share or, even rarer, a file on a disk that ran out of free space. That's not something a program can (or even should try to) work around of, that's what its environment should do. As for the fact that glibc has malloc()-ing implementation of printf() — glibc has many strange implementation decisions. For example, its sscanf() interanlly calls strlen() on the string to scan, so calling e.g. sscanf(1GB_LARGE_BUFFER, "%d", &out) is a bad idea, especially in a loop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26300451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26300451