Hi, In strcpy(3), the examples currently show:
char chararray[6]; (void)strncpy(chararray, "abc", sizeof(chararray)); (and other similar examples). I've observed people learning to code make the common mistake of assuming that 'sizeof' will give you the size of any buffer, including one that's dynamically allocated. That is, they may take the example from the manual page and change it to something like char *buf; buf = malloc(BUFSIZ); strncpy(buf, data, sizeof(buf)); Now the example code in the manual page does the right thing because the array is of a fixed size known at compile time, but in the code above, 'sizeof(buf)' will return 8 and lead to unexpected behavior. This isn't obvious to many people, and I wonder if it would make sense to change the example code in the manual page to not use 'sizeof', so as not to offer code that can be copied without context, e.g., #define NUM 6 char chararray[NUM]; (void)strncpy(chararray, "abc", NUM); I can imagine arguments being made that people should not copy code from manual pages without understanding it (and I'm at least somewhat sympathetic to that point of view as well). So... your thoughts? -Jan
