Author: Julia Lawall <Julia.Lawall@lip6.fr> Change the call to PTR_ERR to access the value just tested by IS_ERR. The semantic match that finds this problem is as follows: (http://coccinelle.lip6.fr/) // @@ expression e,e1; @@ ( if (IS_ERR(e)) { … PTR_ERR(e) … } | if (IS_ERR(e=e1)) { … PTR_ERR(e) … } | *if (IS_ERR(e)) { … * …