Eus wrote: > Hi Ho! > > --- On Thu, 6/12/08, Vardhan, Sundara (GE Infra, Energy) <sundara.vardhan@xxxxxx> wrote: > >> Hi All >> >> I am calling a function x within strcpy as follows >> >> strcpy(a,x("sample text","default text")); >> >> x is defined as follows >> >> char * x(char *m, char *n) >> { >> char *return_val=NULL; >> if (check m is in database) >> return_val=m; >> else >> return_val=n; >> return(return_val); >> } >> This causes the array a to have a corrupted string. The string is either m or n but with illegal characters appended. >> So I tried the following >> char *temp=NULL >> temp=x("sample text","default text"); >> strcpy(a,temp); >> >> >> When I printed temp, it looked file, but when I printed a it was garbled. I had initialized as a[0]='\0'; >> >> The same program works fine in Sun and IBM. Is there anything in GCC that I need to use as flag to have this not occur? >> Any help or pointers will be greatly appreciated. > > It looks like that you have not zeroed your `a'. > `a[0]='\0';' is not enough. > Either you do `char a[BUFFER_SIZE] = {0};' when defining `a' or, better, you do `memset(a, 0, BUFFER_SIZE);' That's a wrong answer: strcpy() copies the zero terminator as well. The problem is probably with the declaration of a. To Sundara: we need a *complete* program that shows this problem Andrew.