> but no function with that signature could possibly work in this case.
This is the source of the bugs in C. People write functions that only work given all calls to them are never changed, which is absurd. Good modern C code involves trying to protect against bad usage and adding defensive checks.
So yes, the built-in strcpy is crap which is why most competent C doesn't use it except in a few rare cases where it's required.
And this does demonstrate actual bugs in the code. I wrote a test case that causes it, which incidentally is a common bug in C code called a buffer overflow. It's because of code examples like this that get copied to other situations that we have these defects.
From my codebase/third-party directory on my laptop (a bit random, I admit), from those projects I'd consider "competent C" (ie, not OpenSSL or MRI ruby):
* dovecot uses ASCIIZ strings and libc string functions
* redis uses ASCIIZ strings and libc string functions
* libevent uses ASCIIZ strings and libc string functions
* qmail uses djb's string library
* memcached uses ASCIIZ strings and libc string functions
It's probably good to be comfortable with both approaches.
I don't know that you actually made this claim, but you seem to have given people here the impression that you believe functions that work with ASCIIZ strings should be bulletproofed to handle non-ASCIIZ inputs. I couldn't agree with that argument, especially as an argument about K&R's code being rusty.
People here are jumpy though (they're commenting, like me, mostly because they're bored).
Hmm, reading the source it looks like he is using His sds string library, which has Len, size and a asciiz char* member. When last I checked he does pass the char* around (because it is null terminated) but he also sometimes will do pointer math to get back to the sds
You're right; I was reacting to the count of char\s+star and snprintf calls, but only fair to chalk Redis up among the packages I have that rely on a high-level string library.
This is the source of the bugs in C. People write functions that only work given all calls to them are never changed, which is absurd. Good modern C code involves trying to protect against bad usage and adding defensive checks.
So yes, the built-in strcpy is crap which is why most competent C doesn't use it except in a few rare cases where it's required.
And this does demonstrate actual bugs in the code. I wrote a test case that causes it, which incidentally is a common bug in C code called a buffer overflow. It's because of code examples like this that get copied to other situations that we have these defects.