Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!amdcad!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!ukc!s1!jrk
From: jrk@s1.sys.uea.ac.uk (Richard Kennaway CMP RA)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: retiring gets(3)
Message-ID: <182@s1.sys.uea.ac.uk>
Date: 10 Nov 88 12:34:25 GMT
References: <1988Nov8.054845.23998@utstat.uucp> <1031@cps3xx.UUCP>
Organization: UEA, Norwich, UK
Lines: 18



Not being a Real Programmer (tm), I had to look in the Unix manual to see
what the fuss was about.  The gist of the entry for gets(3) is:

	NAME		gets, fgets - get a string from a stream
	SYNOPSIS	char *gets(s)

	gets reads characters from the standard input stream, stdin,
	into  the  array pointed to by s, until a new-line character
	is read or an end-of-file  condition  is  encountered.

In other words, gets will read an *arbitrarily large* amount of data from
the file and place it in memory, beginning at &(s[0]).  Presumably the
programmer must guess a suitable amount of memory to allocate for s, then
pray that no-one ever runs his program on a file with very long lines.

Words fail me.