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Sprintf Portability and Leading Zeros

On some platforms, code such as the following can be used to output a string with leading zeros left padded to a length of 4. sprintf(*str, “%04s”, *pstr); This works on AIX for example. However if the same code is compiled on Linux using gcc, it outputs leading spaces, padded to a length of 4, instead of leading zeros. There is no simple way to fix this behavior. This particular usage of leading zero padding with the string format is explicitly undefined in the various C standards. What is outputted depends on a platform’s libraries rather than the compiler. As

The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix

The December 2011 issue of the IEEE Spectum magazine has an interesting article on Unix by Warren Toomey. It includes some material on the origins and evolution of Unix which I have never come across before. End runs around AT&T’s lawyers indeed became the norm—even at Bell Labs. For example, between the release of the sixth edition of Unix in 1975 and the seventh edition in 1979, Thompson collected dozens of important bug fixes to the system, coming both from within and outside of Bell Labs. He wanted these to filter out to the existing Unix user base, but the