Modern C for Absolute Beginners: A Friendly Introduction to the C Programming Language

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2024

S. DmitrovićModern C for Absolute Beginnershttps://doi.org/10.1007/979-8-8688-0224-9_36

36. Do Not Use the gets Function

Slobodan Dmitrović¹  

(1)

Belgrade, Serbia

 

The gets function is declared inside the <stdio.h> header, reads the input into a character array pointed to by str, and has the following syntax:

char *gets (char* str);

This function is hazardous as it can cause a buffer overflow and allows for potential buffer overflow attacks. The function is deprecated in the C99 standard and removed in the C11 standard. Do not use this function!

The workaround is to use the fgets alternative. Unlike gets, the fgets function performs bounds checking and is safe ...