Issue in man page wcsncpy.3

Sam James sam@cmpct.info
Sun Dec 4 23:09:07 GMT 2022



> On 4 Dec 2022, at 23:06, Sam James via Libc-alpha <libc-alpha@sourceware.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 4 Dec 2022, at 20:42, Alejandro Colomar via Libc-alpha <libc-alpha@sourceware.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Helge, glibc developers,
>> 
>> On 12/4/22 10:07, Helge Kreutzmann wrote:
>>> Without further ado, the following was found:
>>> Issue:    Is the "L" in the bracket (for the NULL character) correct?
>>> "The B<wcsncpy>()  function is the wide-character equivalent of the"
>>> "B<strncpy>(3)  function.  It copies at most I<n> wide characters from the"
>>> "wide-character string pointed to by I<src>, including the terminating null"
>>> "wide character (L\\(aq\\e0\\(aq), to the array pointed to by I<dest>."
>>> "Exactly I<n> wide characters are written at I<dest>.  If the length"
>>> "I<wcslen(src)> is smaller than I<n>, the remaining wide characters in the"
>>> "array pointed to by I<dest> are filled with null wide characters.  If the"
>>> "length I<wcslen(src)> is greater than or equal to I<n>, the string pointed"
>>> "to by I<dest> will not be terminated by a null wide character."
>> 
>> As an unrelated note.  I've had this running in my mind for some time... your various bug reports for strncpy(3) and similar wide character functions have triggered those thougts.
>> 
>> I'm going to mark strncpy(3) and similar functions as deprecated, even if no libc or standard has done so.  There's wide agreement (at least in some communities) that strncpy(3) _is evil_.  There's simply no use for it.
>> 
> 
> Please don't do this unilaterally. Apple did this unilaterally for sprintf which has caused problems, as well.

snprintf, that is
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