Bugtraq mailing list archives

Re: strcpy versus strncpy


From: eivind () YES NO (Eivind Eklund)
Date: Tue, 3 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.



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