Scoping question in C

[Henry Spencer]

On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, Taavi Burns wrote:
> > For that, you have to call strcpy().
> 
> Note: NEVER use strcpy().  Use only strncpy(), and always provide a
> correct length parameter, lest you summon a buffer overflow demon.  ;)

strcpy() is perfectly safe if you know the length of the string being
copied.  There is a faction which argues that that is the preferable
approach.

strncpy() is actually not much of an improvement, because if the string
being copied does overflow the destination, strncpy() won't NUL-terminate
it, which is likely to mess up the *next* use of that string.

If you want to delegate the length checking to the copy routine, what you
want is something like OpenBSD's strlcpy() (not generally available in
Linux, alas, due to the religious beliefs of the glibc maintainers). 

                                                          Henry Spencer
                                                       henry-lqW1N6Cllo0sV2N9l4h3zg at public.gmane.org

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