Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!ucsd!ogicse!decwrl!shelby!csli!poser
From: poser@csli.Stanford.EDU (Bill Poser)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: strncpy
Message-ID: <11616@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 5 Jan 90 21:47:58 GMT
References: <e-mail_to_poser> <11527@csli.Stanford.EDU> <000003Q@cdis-1.UUCP>
Sender: poser@csli.Stanford.EDU (Bill Poser)
Reply-To: poser@csli.stanford.edu (Bill Poser)
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 13

In article <000003Q@cdis-1.UUCP> tanner@cdis-1.UUCP (Dr. T. Andrews) writes:
>Your consideration of strcpy()/strncpy() is more than a little
>reminiscent of a man who has in hand a claw hammer and a ball peen
>hammer, and who wishes to know why he can't pull nails with the
>latter.

Not really. It's more like the question of why the carpentry shop
has a ball peen hammer (used for metal working) and doesn't have
a claw hammer. strncpy is a function evidently designed for use with
fixed-length character buffers, not the null-terminated strings that
are semi-standard in C. That makes one wonder why strncpy is included
with functions that are intended for use with null-terminated strings,
and why there is no "safe" copying function for the latter.