Then don't do it the hard way and store something like a password in some general text file that needs to be parsed, just have the password in its own file. Thi

Then don't do it the hard way and store something like a password in some general text file that needs to be parsed, just have the password in its own file. This is also good practice when that's otherwise a sane idea because you can apply separate permissions to that password file. Working with that sort of file in C is trivial, you either open() and read() from that file, or mmap() it.