13 Nov
2019
13 Nov
'19
5:22 a.m.
On Tue, Nov 12, 2019 at 3:54 PM Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
On Tue, 12 Nov 2019, Bakul Shah wrote:
POSIX can't even recognize that leap seconds exist :(
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.[*]
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