daniel:// stenberg://RE: https://hachyderm.io/@kees/116282745861595200
Fun to see the Linux kernel follow in #curl's footsteps! 😎 (we removed the last strncpy from curl in late 2025)
kasperdDo I understand correctly that the problem with strncpy is that after the call you don’t know if the buffer is NUL terminated or not?
@kasperd yes. but we also find that code generally improves using other solutions so in curl we don't replace it with something that guarantees a null terminator. We write the code another way instead.
0x0If the input string is longer than the given limit the output buffer will have no NUL character. As far as I can tell that’s the behavior required by the specification.
If you are lucky there might be a NUL character just after the buffer. But that’s not something you can count on.
What also came as a surprise to me is that it pads the buffer with NUL bytes if the string is shorter. That may be desirable for some use cases, but I think in more common scenarios that just hurts performance.