.\" Copyright (C) 1993 David Metcalfe (david@prism.demon.co.uk)
.\"
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.\" Since the Linux kernel and libraries are constantly changing, this
.\" manual page may be incorrect or out-of-date.  The author(s) assume no
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.\" References consulted:
.\"     Linux libc source code
.\"     Lewine's _POSIX Programmer's Guide_ (O'Reilly & Associates, 1991)
.\"     386BSD man pages
.\" Modified Sat Jul 24 18:06:49 1993 by Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu)
.\" Modified Fri Aug 25 23:17:51 1995 by Andries Brouwer (aeb@cwi.nl)
.\" Modified Wed Dec 18 00:47:18 1996 by Andries Brouwer (aeb@cwi.nl)
.\"
.TH STRCPY 3  "April 11, 1993" "GNU" "Linux Programmer's Manual"
.SH NAME
strcpy, strncpy \- copy a string
.SH SYNOPSIS
.nf
.B #include <string.h>
.sp
.BI "char *strcpy(char *" dest ", const char *" src );
.sp
.BI "char *strncpy(char *" dest ", const char *" src ", size_t " n );
.fi
.SH DESCRIPTION
The \fBstrcpy()\fP function copies the string pointed to be \fIsrc\fP
(including the terminating `\\0' character) to the array pointed to by 
\fIdest\fP.  The strings may not overlap, and the destination string 
\fIdest\fP must be large enough to receive the copy.
.PP
The \fBstrncpy()\fP function is similar, except that not more than
\fIn\fP bytes of \fIsrc\fP are copied. Thus, if there is no null byte
among the first \fIn\fP bytes of \fIsrc\fP, the result wil not be
null-terminated.
.PP
In the case where the length of
.I src
is less than that of
.IR n ,
the remainder of
.I dest
will be padded with nulls.
.SH "RETURN VALUE"
The \fBstrcpy()\fP and \fBstrncpy()\fP functions return a pointer to
the destination string \fIdest\fP.
.SH BUGS
If the destination string of a \fBstrcpy()\fP is not large enough
(that is, if the programmer was stupid/lazy, and failed to check
the size before copying) then anything might happen.
Overflowing fixed length strings is a favourite cracker technique.
.SH "CONFORMING TO"
SVID 3, POSIX, BSD 4.3, ISO 9899
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.BR bcopy "(3), " memccpy "(3), " memcpy "(3), " memmove (3)