Before using any function of the strcpy family, try to think about why you are using them. The first question is: do I need a copy? Obviously, often, you do, b

Before using any function of the strcpy family, try to think about why you are using them. The first question is: do I need a copy? Obviously, often, you do, but maybe you can avoid it. Copying data can be costly in terms of performance, and of course, without copying, no need to allocate memory or deal with buffers sizes. Now, that you are sure that you indeed need a copy, maybe you should consider using memcpy() instead. If you already know the sizes of your strings, then it is a no-brainer. If you don't, maybe doing strlen()/strnlen() first on your input data is a good idea, and if it is too big, handle the error appropriately, and if it is not, then do a memcpy() now that you have the size. The default behavior of "safe" variants of strcpy() it to truncate the string to the maximum size. It is certainly better than a buffer overflow, but it may not be what you want, just ask your ass isstant.