Let's not forget that it's also not natively available in glibc. Though you'll find it in every BSD you can think of.
Let's not forget that it's also not natively available in glibc. Though you'll find it in every BSD you can think of.
Like snprintf(3), the strlcpy() and strlcat() functions return the total
length of the string they tried to create. For strlcpy() that means the
length of src. For strlcat() that means the initial length of dst plus
the length of src.
So if you've mmaped in something like the OpenStreetMaps xml dump file and try to strlcpy out the first 100 bytes (because you didn't want to have to null terminate it yourself after a memcpy), you'll notice that your program is running rather slowly.In fairness, that is probably just not the target "market" for strlcpy. Presumably, it is meant for "please copy this whole string which I expect to fit in the target (but catch me in the rare case that it does not)".
They made it this way to make it more of a drop-in replacement for strncpy, but IMHO they should have changed the return value to be the number of characters copied. If your return value is less than n, then your string was copied completely, if it is equal to n then your string was truncated.
There are good reasons to use strlcpy over memcpy. For example you have a text parser where the most common case is each string is only a few bytes long, but you need to be able to handle odd cases where they are much longer. So you have a large buffer that you only use a tiny chunk of most times. With strlcpy it will be quick, but memcpy will be chugging the whole buffer each time.