-Rumour has it that the reason that strcpy () has such bizarre semantics (copying up to the entire length of the string and not leaving space for the terminating '', and padding to the end of the buffer with ''s if it's shorter) come from the days when you could read/write a directory. If you wanted to create a hardlink you opened the directory for writing and wrote the filename and the inode number into the directory. The filename had to be exactly ''n'' bytes long and must be '' padded (instead of just terminated), hence the strncpy() semantics. It's far too late now to change the semantics to something more sane, so the [OpenBSD] people are advocating the use of strlcpy(3) instead. Note, in high performance applications, strlcpy(3) is much faster than strncpy(3) as it doesn't waste time padding the entire string.