I'm late to this discussion, but did you possibly miss stpcpy() and its variants? Or is something about them that doesn't meet your needs? STPCPY(3) Lin

I'm late to this discussion, but did you possibly miss stpcpy() and its variants? Or is something about them that doesn't meet your needs? STPCPY(3) Linux Programmer's Manual NAME stpcpy - copy a string returning a pointer to its end SYNOPSIS #include <string.h> char *stpcpy(char *dest, const char *src); Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see feature_test_macros(7)): stpcpy(): Since glibc 2.10: _XOPEN_SOURCE >= 700 || _POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 200809L Before glibc 2.10: _GNU_SOURCE DESCRIPTION The stpcpy() function copies the string pointed to by src (including the terminating null byte ('\0')) to the array pointed to by dest. The strings may not overlap, and the destination string dest must be large enough to receive the copy. RETURN VALUE stpcpy() returns a pointer to the end of the string dest (that is, the address of the terminating null byte) rather than the beginning. CONFORMING TO This function was added to POSIX.1-2008. Before that, it was not part of the C or POSIX.1 standards, nor customary on UNIX systems, but was not a GNU invention either. Perhaps it came from MS-DOS. It is also present on the BSDs. BUGS This function may overrun the buffer dest. EXAMPLE For example, this program uses stpcpy() to concatenate foo and bar to produce foobar, which it then prints. #define _GNU_SOURCE #include <string.h> #include <stdio.h> int main(void) { char buffer[20]; char *to = buffer; to = stpcpy(to, "foo"); to = stpcpy(to, "bar"); printf("%s\n", buffer); } SEE ALSO memccpy(3), stpncpy(3), wcpcpy(3)