C programming hint

[Stew Rubenstein]

In article <899 at teddy.UUCP> kps at teddy.UUCP (Kesavan P. Srinivasan) writes:
>I found a way to initialize an array of characters without using a loop.
>Here is the method I used:
>
>	char blanks[SIZE];	/* declare array of SIZE elements */
>	
>	blanks[0] = ' ';	/* initialize 1st element */
>
>	strncpy(blanks + 1, blanks, SIZE - 1);	/* initialize entire array */
>		   ^^^       ^^^       ^^^
>		    |         |         |
>		destination  source   how many characters to copy 
>
>The trick is to use strncpy in an almost recursive way.
>Well, I hope you found this useful.

This is not portable.  There is no guarantee that strncpy() copies
one char at a time in forward order.  If it is implemented using the
VAX MOVC3 instruction, for example, the overlap of the source and
destination strings does NOT affect the result!

Stew