No, but I'd think to do the ls and the strace as the author did. Then I'd check the manpage instead of stackoverflow. Obviously her way worked, too, but I prefer manpages. /shruggie

(Well, I just knew the answer in this case because I've hit this particular error a bunch of times, but that's not really the point.)

I actually agree with jmgao's point that this inscrutability is the downside of syscalls' limited error return; just pointing out the good as well as the bad.