Strncpy like a boss | Hacker News Reader

Strncpy like a boss

littlecena.com

4 pointsxfactor9734 comments

Please use strlcpy [1] instead.

[1] http://www.unix.com/man-page/freebsd/3/strlcpy/

I feel like developers avoid use of much safer functions like this out of some misguided belief there'll be a performance impact, unfortunately. Premature optimization etc.

I imagine the biggest reason is actually portability. glibc [1] doesn't have strlcpy/strlcat, for example.

1 - http://lwn.net/Articles/507319/

Putting aside the fact that using sizeof is risky in itself, i'd argue the default form should be

    strncpy (buffer, "abcd", sizeof(buffer));
    assert (!buffer[sizeof(buffer) - 1]);

Reply on news.ycombinator.com