Re: the Linux man-pages as an educational tool

Alejandro Colomar <[email protected]> Sun, 2 Aug 2026 13:47:50 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.man,gmane.comp.lib.gnulib.bugs,gmane.comp.lib.glibc.alpha
Message-ID	<am8tWQ4m2AsEudA_@devuan>

Hi Collin,

> > Date: 2026-08-01 18:49:03-0700
> > From: Collin Funk <[email protected]>
> >
> > But myself and likely many others who have commented on this thread do
> > not agree that strings.h is a bad name. Or that general memory related
> > functions, which are used on strings a large portion of the time, need a
> > separate header.

BTW, this typo reminds me that we have some more evidence.  <strings.h>
has existed for a long time in parallel to <string.h>, and some
functions are documented as being provided by it instead of by
<string.h>.  An example is strcasecmp(3).

In practice, both <string.h> and <strings.h> provide strcasecmp(3):

	alx@devuan:~/tmp$ cat s.c 
	#include <string.h>

	int
	main(void)
	{
		void *p = strcasecmp;
	}
	alx@devuan:~/tmp$ gcc -Wall -Wextra -Wno-unused s.c 
	alx@devuan:~/tmp$ 

Every now and then, people wonder about this non-standard header file,
but no cats were harmed by that.  Claiming that <memory.h> would be much
different is unreasonable, IMO.


Cheers,
Alex

-- 
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es>

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