The Forgotten Junk in libc

libc is a patchwork of stuff: syscalls and helper functions that got set in stone aeons ago, warts and all. During the bad times unthinking people stuck in it junk such as:

• atoi() -- does not return errors;
  
• gets() -- has no way of knowing the length of the buffer it populates;
  
• strcpy() -- the all time favourite way of causing a crash: if the src pointer is junk and has no '\0' then the buffer pointed by dst will be filled beyond its boundaries with garbage;
  
• ditto strcat();
  
• sprintf() -- what if the stuff you wish to print into the buffer exceeds the buffer's length?
  
• heck, even strlen(NULL) will crash;
  
• strtok() -- this one is just evil.
  

DO NOT USE THESE CALLS! I cannot count how many time I had to look for crashes and refactor code using this garbage.

-ulianov