Re: [RFC] xnsprintf()

[Andrew Cagney <cagney@gnu.org>]

Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 13, 2005 at 03:48:52PM +0100, Mark Kettenis wrote:
> 
>>The bootdisk of my workstation crashed, so I found myself replacing my
>>aging FreeBSD environment with a fresh OpenBSD snapshot.  The OpenBSD
>>toolchain complains about using dangerous functions like snprintf:
>>
>>   libgdb.a(remote.o)(.text+0xb3b): In function `set_thread':
>>   ../../src/gdb/remote.c:1066: warning: sprintf() is often misused,
>>   please use snprintf()
>>
>>Of course it is right, so I've started converting sprintf() into
>>snprintf().  While doing so, I find myself writing the following bit
>>of code over and over again:
>>
>>   int size;
>>   size = snprintf (buf, sizeof buf, ...);
>>   gdb_assert (size < sizeof buf);
>>
>>So right now I'm wondering whether we should have a function, say
>>xsnprintf(), that checks whether the string fits in the buffer, and
>>throws an internal-error if it doesn't.
>>
>>Opinions?
> 
> 
> Sure.  Seems like a good fit with xasprintf and xstrprintf.

I like this positive change.

http://sources.redhat.com/ml/gdb-patches/2003-04/msg00404.html
I disagree.  Why on earth wouldn't we use sprintf?  Just because it can
be used incorrectly is no excuse.