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Re: gets is not too dangerous


Michael Eager wrote:
Miguel Angel Champin Catalan wrote:
Hello:

We are students of computer sciences in the Santa Maria University, Chile. We just want to know if the function "gets" it's too dangerous for a warning. The fact is that our teacher's assistant give us a homework, and one restriction was to use gcc to compile our code, without warnings.
We ask you for a simple explanation (if it's possible) about our warning, telling that "gets" is not too dangerous, because in our case, works perfectly, under some restrictions obviously.

Instead of using gets(), use fgets(). It's similar in function and easy to use, but doesn't permit overwriting the input buffer.
                                      ^^^^^^^^^^^
                                      overrunning

As a university student, I would hope that you would want to learn the best way to do a task. Your teacher's assistant seems to be encouraging you to use best practices. The difference between poor practice and good practice usually comes down to that poor practice "works perfectly, in our case, under some restrictions", while good practice just "works perfectly".



--
Michael Eager	 eager@eagercon.com
1960 Park Blvd., Palo Alto, CA 94306  650-325-8077


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