The ups and downs of strlcpy()

First, an apology to Michael; he sent me (as a member of the joint POSIX/ISO/SUS working group that made the decision not to include strl*() ) a request for more information on the decision -- but his email came to me while I was in a set of meetings and I did not respond in time for this article.

At the time that strl*() was being proposed, the *_s() routines were being discussed in ISO C. As POSIX (and SUS) defer to ISO C in places where there are conflicts this was one reason not to add strl*().

Additionally, the glibc participants pointed out that to *correctly* use strl*() typically required more lines of code than coding the operation from scratch - as noted in Paul Eggert's observations.

The result was that there was no consensus in the WG for adding the functions at the time the 2008 specification was being worked.