NAME

erfc, erfcf, erfcl - complementary error function

LIBRARY

Math library (libm, -lm)

SYNOPSIS

#include <math.h>

double erfc(double x);
float erfcf(float x);
long double erfcl(long double x);

Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see feature_test_macros(7)):

erfc():

    _ISOC99_SOURCE || _POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 200112L || _XOPEN_SOURCE
        || /* Since glibc 2.19: */ _DEFAULT_SOURCE
        || /* glibc <= 2.19: */ _BSD_SOURCE || _SVID_SOURCE

erfcf(), erfcl():

    _ISOC99_SOURCE || _POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 200112L
        || /* Since glibc 2.19: */ _DEFAULT_SOURCE
        || /* glibc <= 2.19: */ _BSD_SOURCE || _SVID_SOURCE

DESCRIPTION

These functions return the complementary error function of x, that is, 1.0 - erf(x).

RETURN VALUE

On success, these functions return the complementary error function of x, a value in the range [0,2].

If x is a NaN, a NaN is returned.

If x is +0 or -0, 1 is returned.

If x is positive infinity, +0 is returned.

If x is negative infinity, +2 is returned.

If the function result underflows and produces an unrepresentable value, the return value is 0.0.

If the function result underflows but produces a representable (i.e., subnormal) value, that value is returned, and a range error occurs.

ERRORS

See math_error(7) for information on how to determine whether an error has occurred when calling these functions.

The following errors can occur:

Range error: result underflow (result is subnormal): An underflow floating-point exception (FE_UNDERFLOW) is raised.

These functions do not set errno.

ATTRIBUTES

For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see attributes(7).

Interface	Attribute	Value
erfc (), erfcf (), erfcl ()	Thread safety	MT-Safe

STANDARDS

C11, POSIX.1-2008.

HISTORY

C99, POSIX.1-2001.

The variant returning double also conforms to SVr4, 4.3BSD.

NOTES

The erfc(), erfcf(), and erfcl() functions are provided to avoid the loss accuracy that would occur for the calculation 1-erf(x) for large values of x (for which the value of erf(x) approaches 1).