> ~~Technically~~ Optionally, C11 has strcpy_s and strcat_s which fail explicitly on truncation. So if C11 is acceptable for you, that might be the a reasonable option, provided you always handle the failure case.

One of the big problems with C programmers is they often neglect to check for and handle those failure cases. Did you know that printf() can fail, and has a return value that you can check for error? (Not you, personally, but the "HN reader" you) Do you check for this error in your code? Many of the string functions will return special values on error, but I frequently see code that never checks. Unfortunately, there isn't a great way to audit your code for ignored return values with the compiler, as far as I know. GCC has -Wunused-result, but it only outputs a warning if the offending function is attributed with "warn_unused_result".

I'm not a huge fan of using return values for error checking, but we have the C library that we have.