Alejandro Colomar <alx@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: > strncpy(3) is useful to write to fixed-width buffers like `struct utmp` > and `struct utmpx`. Is there any other libc API that needs strncpy(3)? Let's not limit ourselves to glibc APIs. Tar format, for example, uses fixed length fields (and my bet is that strncpy was created for it) yet tar is not part of glibc. IMHO the solution here is to document strncpy with sufficiently obvious intent that it is NOT a length-limited strcpy (i.e. strlcpy) and should ONLY be used for its intended purpose (filling a space-padded but not null-terminated field) It is not documentation's purpose to limit programmer's creativity, just to give them an accurate representation of what the functions do.
