My alternative is to do a strlen for each string, then use memcpy memset memchr instead.

> I thought they're a safer strcpy/strcat

Let's look at the documentation for strncpy, from the C Standard:

"The strncpy function copies not more than n characters (characters that follow a null character are not copied) from the array pointed to by s2 to the array pointed to by s1."

There's a subtle gotcha there. It may not result in a 0 terminated string!

"If the array pointed to by s2 is a string that is shorter than n characters, null characters are appended to the copy in the array pointed to by s1, until n characters in all have been written."

A performance problem if you're using a large buffer.

Yeah, always prefer snprintf.

The time functions? I'm just very careful using them.