Re: strcpy versus strncpy
Eivind Eklund (eivind@YES.NO)
Tue, 03 Mar 1998 09:53:17 +0100
On Tue, Mar 03, 1998 at 01:31:24AM +0100, Morten Welinder wrote:
> A recent article on BugTraq suggested that using strcpy should
> almost always be considered a bug. That's not right. It is,
> in fact, the wrong way around: strncpy is almost always a bug.
>
> True, strncpy will avoid buffer overruns, but that only proven
> that strncpy is better than incorrect use of strcpy. The problem
> is that such use of strncpy can introduce problems of its own:
The correct function to use for avoiding buffer overruns would be
sancpy() - strcpy with abort on overflow. Too bad nothing have the
function available at the moment - it is on the list of possible
enhancements for FreeBSD. The same goes for sanprintf().
Eivind.