On Tue, 12 Nov 2019, Bakul Shah wrote:
> Unfortunately strcpy & other buffer overflow friendly functions are
> still present in the C standard (I am looking at n2434.pdf, draft of
> Sept 25, 2019). Is C really not fixable?
No; POSIX requires all sorts of broken functions be present, otherwise it
is not compliant; heck, last I looked it even requires gets(). And let's
not even mention pointers... We are our own worst enemy.[*]
POSIX can't even recognize that leap seconds exist :(
All is not lost, though; use strncpy() instead of strcpy() etc. These
days my first choice is Perl, despite it being bloated (I only use C if
it's trivial or I need the speed). I must look at Ruby, though...
strncpy has two issues. First, it doesn't guarantee NUL termination. Second, it always writes N bytes. It's for a fixed width data field, not a variable length string whose buffer size is known. strlcpy is much better, but still has some issues...
Warner