retiring gets(3)

[Griff Smith]

In article <9054 at ihlpb.ATT.COM>, gregg at ihlpb.ATT.COM (Wonderly) writes:
> I believe that the right thing to do is to use a new function called
> nlfgets (str, size, fp), that does exactly as gets(3).  The biggest
> concern that most people have about moving from gets to fgets is the
> added hassle of doing a 
| 
> 	if ((t = strchr (buf, '\n')) != NULL)
> 		*t = 0;
| 
> This seems to be a lot of work when you may be processing thousands of
> lines of code.  I have written this exact function many times just to
> have the benefit of no strchr() call.
> -- 
> It isn't the DREAM that NASA's missing...  DOMAIN: gregg at ihlpb.att.com
> It's a direction!                          UUCP:   att!ihlpb!gregg

I think this misses the point.  Gets guarantees that you will read all
the characters in a line, but forces you to write insecure programs.
One must also make the dubious assumption that the first null
encountered is the terminal null rather than a null in the file.  Your
variation avoids the security problem, but preserves the ambiguity of
nulls.  It also adds another ambiguity: if someone hands you a line
that is longer than your buffer, you gratuitously break it into two
lines since you don't know where the newline is.  Fgets avoids all
these problems by marking the end of a line with newline.  Proper use
requires that you call fgets until you find the newline.  You may need
to use malloc as you discover that the line is much larger than
anticipated.  Fgets does have one annoying flaw: it should return the
character count instead of the worthless pointer to the destination.

If you complain that all this fuss is unnecessary, since all reasonable
input will fit in the buffer you provided, you are really saying you
don't like to write correct programs.  I sometimes settle for `partially
correct': a program must either operate as specified or stop.  Breaking
lines isn't even partially correct.
-- 
Griff Smith	AT&T (Bell Laboratories), Murray Hill
Phone:		1-201-582-7736
UUCP:		{most AT&T sites}!ulysses!ggs
Internet:	ggs at ulysses.att.com