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Comment by _cbsz | Hacker News Reader

    case OPTTYPE_KEYMAP:
        str = malloc(1 + sizeof "submenu");
        strcpy(str, "submenu");
        return str;

There isn't a good reason for this not to be

    return strdup("submenu");

is there?

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>1 +

That's unnecessary. But then again I can't really blame them. It isn't always clear when you have to do that. Also a previous version might have used strlen() instead of sizeof.

malloc+strcpy is standard C, strdup is not.

While I agree, strdup is POSIX. In the exceedingly rare event that you're on a system without it, it's simple enough to roll your own. (And if this occurred more than a couple of times, I'd roll my own anyways to keep the code obvious.)

In the exceedingly rare event that you need to target Windows?

#define strdup _strdup

Windows isn't the only non-POSIX OS out there, maybe for the HN crowd I guess.

Honestly, when I wrote the post, I thought I recalled that Windows had strdup (Windows does include some limited POSIX functionality, IIRC; e.g., "select" definitely exists, and is also a POSIX function, so I figured surely strdup was there.) MSDN seems to indicate that Windows does in fact have strdup — and that it's "deprecated" in favor of "_strdup", which appears to do exactly the same thing as strdup… what on earth is going on here?

Nethack does have a lot of ports to weird systems (and compilers that might not special-case strdup on a string literal to avoid the strlen, which I didn't think of when I brought this up in the first place), so this seems like a fair enough reason to me.

I'd wager a significant amount of production C is running on systems without ANY OS

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