On Apr 24, 12:38, Paul E Coad wrote:
On Fri, 24 Apr 1998, Captain Napalm wrote:
It was thus said that the Great Pete Turnbull
once stated:
On Apr 24, 1:35, Captain Napalm wrote:
strcpy() (at least on my compiler) will crash
if any of the
parameters are NULL pointers,
That's a compiler (or library, actually) bug. You should be able to
copy a null string.
Well, I've tried it across four platforms and five compilers
(Linux/GCC, Solaris/native and GCC, AIX/native and HPUX/native) and
three of the five core dumped.
The ANSI standard is not completely silent on the matter, but does not
define the behavior.
"Each of the following statements applies unless explicitly stated
otherwise in the detailed descriptions that follow. If an argument
to a function has an invalid value (such as a value outside of the
domain of the function, or a pointer outside the address space of
the program or a null pointer), the behavior is undefined."
Well, whether I think that's sensible or not ('cos I think you ought to be
able to copy a null string), if ANSI says it's undefined, then it's not a
bug. I take it back. And thanks for checking, which I was too lazy to do
:-)
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York