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Comment by kzrdude | Hacker News Reader

You have found the answer - strlcpy is not a replacement for strncpy at all (it's arguably a safer version of strcpy), and git people didn't invent this, it's the existing BSD strlcpy interface.

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Thanks for the confirmation. But my concern remains: they banned strncpy without a proper replacement. In addition, I didn't know the extra restriction of strlcpy until today (I have never used it before because it is not conforming to C99/POSIX). I might have fallen into this trap.

The problem is the actually often the opposite, in the real world many treat strncpy as if it behaves like strlcpy. Note that strlcpy is equivalent to:

    snprintf(buf, sizeof(buf), "%s", string);

strlcpy is on track for future standardization in POSIX, for Issue 8, but even as a de facto standard, it exists in libc on *BSD, macOS, Android, Solaris, QNX, and even Linux using musl.

https://www.austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=986#c5050

But you're correct in that it is not a replacement for strncpy because no code should be using strncpy.

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