carta
erfcf(3)

erfcf3

Complementary error function

Part of erfc(3).

Usage

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

_ISOC99_SOURCE { | | _POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 200112L | | _XOPEN_SOURCE}

_ISOC99_SOURCE { | | _POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 200112L}

Library

Math library (libm, -lm)

Overview

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).

InterfaceAttributeValue
erfc(), erfcf(), erfcl()Thread safetyMT-Safe

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).

History

  • Arch Linux 2026-11-01: the text shown here
  • Debian 13 (Trixie)
  • Debian 12 (Bookworm)
  • Debian 11 (Bullseye)
  • Debian 10 (Buster)
  • Debian 9 (Stretch)
  • Debian 8 (Jessie)
  • Debian 7 (Wheezy)
  • Debian 6.0 (Squeeze)
  • Debian 5.0 (Lenny)
  • Debian 4.0 (Etch)
  • Debian 3.1 (Sarge)

Standards

C11, POSIX.1-2008.

History

C99, POSIX.1-2001.

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

From man-pages 6.19-1 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.