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From: dhesi%cirrusl@oliveb.ATC.olivetti.com (Rahul Dhesi)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: strncat is insufficient
Message-ID: <2201@cirrusl.UUCP>
Date: 12 Aug 90 01:30:06 GMT
Sender: news@cirrusl.UUCP
Organization: Cirrus Logic Inc.
Lines: 17

Having recently written some code that does string manipulation and
takes some pains to avoid buffer overflow, I conclude that strncat() is
nearly useless.  Most of the time I want to avoid string overflow by
doing this:

     append str2 to str1, but cause at most n characters to be in str1.

Here is what strncat() does:

     append str2 to str1, but copy at most n characters.

I think the standard C library badly needs another function called,
say, strlimcat(), which limits the length of the destination string to
some value.
--
Rahul Dhesi <dhesi%cirrusl@oliveb.ATC.olivetti.com>
UUCP:  oliveb!cirrusl!dhesi