It's worth noting that, quite often when this subject comes up, people suggest a straight replacement with strncpy, strlcpy, snprintf, or something similiar. Th

It's worth noting that, quite often when this subject comes up, people suggest a straight replacement with strncpy, strlcpy, snprintf, or something similiar. This is safer because it doesn't overwrite memory or cause a segfault, BUT, that's not always enough. If the code just carries on with the truncated string that's data loss and it might cause trouble later. For example imagine a system designed for 8.3 filenames - if you pass a long filename and it gets truncated it may then refer to a completely different file. The man page for strlcpy (IIRC) reminds you of this.