stdio.h & sprintf question

[Chris Torek]

In article <13081 at smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>>char    *sprintf();             /* too painful to do right */
>... is an artifact from an early implementation of sprintf() ...
>While Berkeley didn't [fix sprintf] for quite a while, because as the
>comment indicates it would require tracking down all uses in
>applications and fixing them, I think 4.4BSD plans to track the C
>standard, which specifies int-valued.

The type of sprintf was changed either for or immediately after the
`tahoe' release of 4.3BSD.  <stdio.h> now contains an int declaration,
without any mysterious `#ifdef vax'.  The number of programs that
subsequently fail to compile and/or run is astonishing (this includes,
e.g., X11R3).  In most cases it is simply a matter of removing the
declaration `char *sprintf();' from some source modules; in some
cases it requires expanding things, e.g., from
	return (sprintf(buf, "%s/%s", dir, file));
to
	(void) sprintf(buf, "%s/%s", dir, file);
	return (buf);
and it is the latter that is painful.  (No, there is no `osprintf'
function that acts like sprintf but returns its first argument, though
if someone argued sufficiently hard for it we might be convinced to
put one in -lcompat.)

While 4.4BSD will not be completely ANSI compliant (even when using
gcc and -D_ANSI_SOURCE), we have at least started the task.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7163)
Domain:	chris at cs.umd.edu	Path:	uunet!mimsy!chris