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Memory Corruption When Using `strncpy` for String Initialization in C

👀 Views: 100 đŸ’Ŧ Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-06
c memory-management strings C

I'm having a hard time understanding Does anyone know how to I've searched everywhere and can't find a clear answer. Quick question that's been bugging me - I'm working with a frustrating scenario when using `strncpy` to initialize strings in my C program. Specifically, I'm running into memory corruption issues that lead to corrupted outputs when I try to print initialized strings. The version of GCC I'm using is 11.2 on Ubuntu 20.04. Here's a simplified version of my code: ```c #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> #define BUFFER_SIZE 10 int main() { char buffer[BUFFER_SIZE]; const char *source = "This string is too long"; // Using strncpy to copy the string strncpy(buffer, source, BUFFER_SIZE); // Make sure to null-terminate the string buffer[BUFFER_SIZE - 1] = '\0'; printf("Buffer content: %s\n", buffer); return 0; } ``` The intention was to copy the string into `buffer`, but I keep getting unexpected output when printing it. Instead of just cutting off the string, it seems to affect other parts of my program, leading to a segmentation fault later on. I've tried to ensure that the buffer is properly null-terminated, but this still leads to memory corruption. I also considered using `snprintf`, but I wanted to stick with `strncpy` for now to understand the underlying scenario. Any insights into what might be going wrong here? Is there a specific behavior of `strncpy` that I am overlooking, especially regarding null-termination or buffer overflows? Thanks in advance for your help! I'm working on a web app that needs to handle this. Thanks in advance! What's the best practice here? For reference, this is a production CLI tool. I'd be grateful for any help. My development environment is Windows 11.