parse_hresult

This is a utility to help make sense of the cryptic HRESULT error codes commonly used by Microsoft Windows APIs and programs interfacing with them. It is based on the information available on Wikipedia and MSDN.

Usage

Simply run the command with the hexidecimal error code as the argument. The program will disect the bits of the resulting 32 bit integer and provide resulting analysis. For example

./parse_hresult 0x80070005

will produce the output

 HRESULT = Access is denied. (0x80070005) (-2147024891)
    8    0    0    7    0    0    0    5
 1000 0000 0000 0111 0000 0000 0000 0101
 SRCN X--- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
       | FACILITY  | |      CODE       |

 32    S: Severity (status)              = 1 (failure)
 31    R: Reserved (actual severity)     = 0 (normal)
 30    C: Customer (defined by)          = 0 (Microsoft)
 29    N: NT mapped status value         = 0
 28    X: Is message ID?                 = 0
 27-17 FACILITY: The source of the error = 7 (FACILITY_WIN32: Win32 Error codes)
 16-01 CODE: The error code              = 5 (Access is denied. (0x5))

Compiling

The only dependencies other than standard Windows libraries and headers are make and a c complier (only gcc has been tested). On MSYS2 or Cygwin, the parse_hresult.exe executable can be produced by typing

make

To remove the executable and object files, run

make clean