One criticism I receive is that my code examples, from both my online training material as well as in my C programming books, fail to free any allocated memory before the program quits. This assertion is correct, and I have a darn good reason why!
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From last week’s Lesson, I showed how ANSI codes are used to set color text in terminal output. It’s time to go nuts showing the possibilities.
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Your C programs’ text output need not be so dull. Aside from adding wide characters, you can spice things up with color text. The terminal flavor is what determines the color palette. All you need to know are the secret codes that activate and deactivate the attributes.
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Back in the old days, the printer was a device wired to the computer and handled directly by whatever program wanted to use it. Printing in C involved opening the printer device and sending the data. Today, things work differently.
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As I wrote in last week’s Lesson, the C23 standard renders the memset() function — a standard C library function for over 30 years — obsolete. If you want to initialize a buffer, you can use the secure memset_s() or just initialize the buffer manually or with your own memset()-like function.
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While researching the upcoming — and significant — C23 version of the C programming language, I learned something surprising: The memset() function will be deprecated. It effectively does nothing when used in the C23 standard. The reason makes a lot of sense.
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I doubt any C programmer has memorized all of the printf() function’s placeholders, options, and settings. It’s a character salad of interesting and weird things. One of the strangest has to be the %n placeholder.
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I don’t think I’ve ever used the return value from a printf() statement. Yes, the function has an int return value, which is the number of characters output. This value can be difficult to guess.
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In C programming, variables declared within a function are local to the function. Specifically, they’re the auto storage class, the default. External, or global, variables are defined outside of a function declaration and are of the extern storage class. These variables are available to all functions. But the scope within a function can also be limited, depending on where the variable is declared.
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As I wrote in last week’s Lesson, the system() function can’t be used in Linux to obtain a program’s return value. Instead, you must use one of the execl() family of functions. Further, this function must be spawned as a child process. This task involves using the fork() and wait() functions.
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