Tag

strlcpy

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Linux finally deleted strncpy after six years and 360 patches, and a programmer who saw it born called it 50 years late (phoronix.com)

strncpy was killed for 'counter-intuitive semantics' around NUL termination and wasteful zero-filling. The '360 patches' figure is 360 uses converted to safer calls, not 360 bugs.

The origin: it was written to copy 14-byte, zero-padded-but-not-terminated filenames out of early UNIX directory entries. It was never meant for strings.