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From: mash@mips.UUCP (John Mashey)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: Need strnlen().
Message-ID: <229@mips.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 19-Nov-85 02:03:22 EST
Article-I.D.: mips.229
Posted: Tue Nov 19 02:03:22 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 21-Nov-85 03:43:44 EST
References: <207@a.sei.cmu.edu>
Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 15

> One should never allow a character array to not have a null terminating byte.
> Doing things like this should be automatic. 
Yes, except that for (at the time, and perhaps still) good reasons,
certain structures had strings that might not be null-terminated.
Such include directories (except in 4.2), accounting file command names, 
utmp/wtmp.  Those things are why the strn* routines were written in
the first place.

I generally agree with the first advice, but there are at least a few
occasions where one extra byte is fairly handy.
-- 
-john mashey
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