I see your point but at this point I think it's just a matter of taste. I don't really see how having a function meant to deal with a special case of character buffers disguised as a general purpose string manipulation routine in the stdlib could be considered reasonable. I understand why it's here, I understand the history, I understand why it made sense at some point to have such a function but you won't be able to convince me that it's not broken or that it shouldn't be deprecated in favor of strlcpy (ditto for strncat/strlcat). After all it is in <string.h>, not <fixed-width-string.h>, it's pretty heinous that it fails at the very low bar of actually producing a valid C string every time (especially given the very high prejudice of having rogue unterminated "strings" in a C program).