the Linux man-pages as an educational tool
Alejandro Colomar
alx@kernel.org
Sun Aug 2 11:47:50 GMT 2026
Hi Collin,
> > Date: 2026-08-01 18:49:03-0700
> > From: Collin Funk <collin.funk1@gmail.com>
> >
> > But myself and likely many others who have commented on this thread do
> > not agree that strings.h is a bad name. Or that general memory related
> > functions, which are used on strings a large portion of the time, need a
> > separate header.
BTW, this typo reminds me that we have some more evidence. <strings.h>
has existed for a long time in parallel to <string.h>, and some
functions are documented as being provided by it instead of by
<string.h>. An example is strcasecmp(3).
In practice, both <string.h> and <strings.h> provide strcasecmp(3):
alx@devuan:~/tmp$ cat s.c
#include <string.h>
int
main(void)
{
void *p = strcasecmp;
}
alx@devuan:~/tmp$ gcc -Wall -Wextra -Wno-unused s.c
alx@devuan:~/tmp$
Every now and then, people wonder about this non-standard header file,
but no cats were harmed by that. Claiming that <memory.h> would be much
different is unreasonable, IMO.
Cheers,
Alex
--
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es>
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