pam_strerror(3)

pam_strerror3

Get pam standard error message string

Usage

#include <sys/types.h>

#include <security/pam_appl.h>

const char *

pam_strerror(const pam_handle_t *pamh, int error_number);

Overview

The pam_strerror() function returns a pointer to a string containing a textual description of the error indicated by the error_number argument. The pamh argument is ignored. For compatibility with other implementations, it should be either a valid PAM handle returned by a previous call to pam_start(3), or NULL.

Return values

The pam_strerror() function returns NULL on failure.

Releases

76 releases since FreeBSD 3.1-RELEASE; the text changed 17 times.

  1. 3.1–4.3
  2. 4.4–4.11
  3. 5.0
  4. 5.1
  5. 5.2–5.2.1
  6. 5.3–5.5
  7. 6.0–6.3
  8. 6.4
  9. 7.0
  10. 7.1–9.1
  11. 9.2
  12. 9.3–10.0
  13. 10.1–11.2
  14. 11.3–11.4
  15. 12.0–12.2
  16. 12.3–13.2
  17. 13.3–14.5
  18. 15.0–16.0

Standards

X/Open Single Sign-On Service (XSSO) - Pluggable Authentication Modules, June 1997.

Authors

The pam_strerror() function and this manual page were developed for the FreeBSD Project by ThinkSec AS and Network Associates Laboratories, the Security Research Division of Network Associates, Inc. under DARPA/SPAWAR contract N66001-01-C-8035 (“CBOSS”), as part of the DARPA CHATS research program.

The OpenPAM library is maintained by Dag-Erling Smørgrav ⟨[email protected]⟩.

From base 16.0-CURRENT-20261027-61c70dc16a79 in FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT (2026-10-27). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.