[getting old punched cards read]

From: Captain Napalm <spc_at_armigeron.com>
Date: Fri Apr 24 13:24:53 1998

It was thus said that the Great Pete Turnbull once stated:
>
> On Apr 24, 1:35, Captain Napalm wrote:
> > Well, I snagged a copy of it, compiled it, found a bug, and fixed it.
> > 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.

  I checked the standard and it doesn't say what it should do in case one of
the parameters is NULL, so I assume this is an implementation detail and the
safest thing to do is assume you can't strcpy() a NULL pointer (which I do
anyway).

  -spc (Considers that a feature, not a bug)
Received on Fri Apr 24 1998 - 13:24:53 BST