Hi Collin, On Fri, Jul 04, 2025 at 05:15:27PM -0700, Collin Funk wrote: > Alejandro Colomar <a...@kernel.org> writes: > > > BTW, I was trying to find out the history of memccpy(3), and why it was > > introduced in 4.4BSD. Does anyone know the history? I find it a weird > > function that doesn't have any good use case, or I don't seem to see it. > > Every use case I see, such as a poor-man's strlcpy(3), seems to be prone > > to off-by-one errors, or have other APIs that would be more ergonomic. > > What were the original uses in 4.4BSD? > > In the sources for 2.11 BSD you can find the following in > include/strings.h: > > /* Routines described in memory(BA_LIB); System V compatibility */ > char *memccpy(), *memchr(), *memcpy(), *memset(), *strchr(), > *strdup(), *strpbrk(), *strrchr(), *strsep(), *strtok(); > > The first time I can see the function defined is in Eigth Edition Unix.
Hmmm, so the FreeBSD manual page seems incorrect:
$ find -type f | grep memccpy.3 | MANWIDTH=72 xargs man 2>/dev/null | sed -n
'/HISTORY/,$p'
HISTORY
The memccpy() function first appeared in 4.4BSD and was first
specified in the . The restrict keyword was added to the proto‐
type in FreeBSD 5.0.0 in accordance with the updated specifica‐
tion of IEEE Std 1003.1-2004 (“POSIX.1”).
Debian December 5, 2023 MEMCCPY(3)
Okay, I'll look into V8 Unix. At least now I know where to search.
Thanks! :)
> You can look for yourself here, <https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl>.
>
Yup, thanks! I was thinking it would be in 4.4BSD, according to
FreeBSD. Unix should be easier to search.
Have a lovely day!
Alex
--
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
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