stdout and stderr are both predefined output streams; for our purposes, the only difference between them is that stderr is not likely to be redirected by the user, so the error messages printed to stderr will always appear on the screen, where they can be seen.
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The cryptic note about ``a pattern-matching program'' simply means that if you want to search the source code of a program for all the exit status values it can return, ``exit'' might be an easier string to search for than ``return.'' (Every call to exit represents an exit from the program, but not every return statement does.)
The feof and ferror functions can be used to check for error conditions more carefully. In general, input routines (such as getchar and getline) return some special value to tell you that they couldn't read any more. Often, this value is EOF, reinforcing the notion that the only possible reason they couldn't read any more was because end-of-file had been reached. However, it's also possible that there was a read error, and you can call feof or ferror to determine whether this was the case. On the output side, though the output routines generally do return an error indication, few programs bother to check the return values from every call to functions such as putchar and printf. One way to check for output errors, without having to check the return value of every function, is to call ferror on the output stream (which might be stdout) at key points.
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This page by Steve Summit // Copyright 1995, 1996 // mail feedback