.\" Copyright 1993 David Metcalfe (david@prism.demon.co.uk) .\" .\" Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this .\" manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are .\" preserved on all copies. .\" .\" Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this .\" manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the .\" entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a .\" permission notice identical to this one .\" .\" Since the Linux kernel and libraries are constantly changing, this .\" manual page may be incorrect or out-of-date. The author(s) assume no .\" responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from .\" the use of the information contained herein. The author(s) may not .\" have taken the same level of care in the production of this manual, .\" which is licensed free of charge, as they might when working .\" professionally. .\" .\" Formatted or processed versions of this manual, if unaccompanied by .\" the source, must acknowledge the copyright and authors of this work. .\" .\" References consulted: .\" Linux libc source code .\" 386BSD man pages .\" Modified Sat Jul 24 18:50:48 1993 by Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu) .\" Interchanged `needle' and `haystack'; added history, aeb, 980113. .TH MEMMEM 3 "January 13, 1998" "GNU" "Linux Programmer's Manual" .SH NAME memmem \- locate a substring .SH SYNOPSIS .nf .B #include .sp .BI "void *memmem(const void *" haystack ", size_t " haystacklen , .RS .BI "const void *" needle ", size_t " needlelen ); .fi .SH DESCRIPTION The \fBmemmem()\fP function finds the start of the first occurrence of the substring \fIneedle\fP of length \fIneedlelen\fP in the memory area \fIhaystack\fP of length \fIhaystacklen\fP. .SH "RETURN VALUE" The \fBmemmem()\fP function returns a pointer to the beginning of the substring, or NULL if the substring is not found. .SH "CONFORMING TO" This function is a GNU extension. .SH BUGS This function was broken in Linux libraries up to and including libc 5.0.9; there the `needle' and `haystack' arguments were interchanged, and a pointer to the end of the first occurrence of \fIneedle\fP was returned. Since libc 5.0.9 is still widely used, this is a dangerous function to use. .br Both old and new libc's have the bug that if \fIneedle\fP is empty \fIhaystack\fP-1 (instead of \fIhaystack\fP) is returned. And glibc (2.0.5) makes it worse, and returns a pointer to the last byte of `haystack'. Hopefully this will be fixed. For the time being, \fImemmem\fP() should not be used with an empty `needle'. .SH "SEE ALSO" .BR strstr (3)