Xref: utzoo comp.unix.questions:25201 comp.lang.c:31554
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Strcpy on SysV vs. BSD.
Message-ID: <4008@auspex.auspex.com>
Date: 2 Sep 90 22:13:09 GMT
References: <24351@adm.BRL.MIL> <13724@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Followup-To: comp.lang.c
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 29

>Heavens, you've made one of the most common blunders made by novice C
>programmers.

Or, to put it another way, "just because routine 'foobar()' is defined
as taking a 'char *' as an argument doesn't mean:

1) what you pass to it has to be a variable declared as a 'char *'

or

2) that you can just pass it any random variable declared as a 'char
   *'."

I suspect the reason some novice C programmers make this blunder is that
they see something like

	int stat(path, buf)
	char *path;
	struct stat *buf;

in the manual, and think "ok, I have to declare a 'struct stat *' to
pass to 'stat()'," and do something such as

	struct stat *buf;

	...

	if (stat("my_file", buf) < 0)
		...