getline function

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2006-02-18 12:54, Tom Grove <freebsd at voidmain.net> wrote:
>Chuck Swiger wrote:
>>Tom Grove wrote:
>>>Mike Jeays wrote:
>>> That works and I had looked into that earlier...it seems like
>>> it does a lot more than just one function from the man page.
>>> I guess I can use that for now but I wonder why getline() is
>>> broken in gcc on FreeBSD?
>>
>> getline() is not part of the standard C library.
>> What makes you think gcc is broken...?
>
> Yeah...I see that after some more research.  So, now I guess my
> question is being that it's not standard and gets() is not safe
> to use what should I use to grab lines?  My gut tells me to
> copy the getline() function from the K&R book but I'm not
> totally sure that's a great idea either.  Stupid strings always
> causing problems!

This is a frequently recurring question in comp.lang.c.  There
are perfectly portable ways to use only ANSI C functions to read
a full line of text, allocating dynamically as much memory as
needed.

For example, a search in the archives of the newsgroup will
provide easily pointers to safe ways to use fgets() to read a line.