Why do I observe messages of the form "<interface name>: Invalid argument" in a dialog box when the front end launches?

When the front end executable loads, a series of common system calls are invoked. The return values of these calls are compared against expected values. In the event that an unexpected value is encountered, warning messages are sent to the stderr stream.

Mathematica 4.0 is compiled on a Compaq Tru64 Unix Version 4.0B system. Between that release of Tru64 Unix and the current one, a change was made in the return value of the system call. Because the code does not take the new value into account, warning messages are printed.

The return values do not adversely affect the operation of the front end. The messages are benign and can be ignored.

However, we are updating our code to take into account the new return value so that this problem does not occur in future releases.

Admittedly, the popup dialog box with warning messages can be an inconvenience. As a workaround, one can invoke Mathematica with the command-line option -nostderrWindow along with appropriate shell redirection operators to direct the warning messages to a file or /dev/null.

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