alt Hacker NewsI always thought that srncpy was the safe alternative to strcpy. Now that I think of it, I'm unsure if the NUL terminator is counted into strncpy's size or not, which would be a likely source of errors. But, could someone explain better what the problems were? And also, would have to pick the right function in the list of given alternatives much better?
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rurban • today at 12:05 PM
No, the safe alternatives end with _s. They do check matching buffer sizes, and enforce zero-termination. Unfortunately WG14 hates them also, because Microsoft. Microsoft did indeed break some of the, but you can use better alternatives, like my safeclib
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The issue with strncpy is that it doesn't actually necessarily terminate - in fact in any case where the source is larger than the destination it will just leave it unterminated (like, it will copy the last character it can from the source instead of terminating the destination string with a NUL)