Visual Studio has a tool [ERRLOOK] which looks up explanations of error codes. When you don't have the convenience of application code that automatically converts and reports this back to you it's nice to have.
I don't know of a similiar utility on Linux (or other Unix variants), but I know the library calls exist to write it (at least for well known system error codes).
Below is my first pass at writing this utility for Linux / Mac OS X using Python's CTypes.
The benifit of using python is that it doesn't need to be compiled (though this is a small benefit)— it's also an example of using CTypes to do FFI. Python also has the errno module which provides a mapping between a numeric error code and a symbolic name.
The calls to load libc.dylib or libc.so.1 might need to be tweaked depending on the system it's running on.
Example output:
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