Bug 5345

Summary: vsnprintf error
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: spock
Component: man-pagesAssignee: Cristian Gafton <gafton>
Status: CLOSED WORKSFORME QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 6.0   
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Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Last Closed: 1999-10-05 06:08:55 UTC Type: ---
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Description spock 1999-09-24 08:30:24 UTC 
The man page for vsnprintf states:
RETURN VALUE
     If  the output was truncated, the return value is -1,
otherwise it is the number of characters stored, not
including the terminating null.

That is not the case.  If I give it a string 10 characters
long, and ask it to print out a string with 18 characters
vnsprintf will return 18, and not -1.  If this is not
considered a bug in the in man page, then it's the
implementation of vsnprintf.
Comment 1 Cristian Gafton 1999-10-05 06:08:59 UTC 
The man page that I have states:
RETURN VALUE
       If the output was truncated, the return value is -1, otherwise
it is the number of characters
       stored,  not including the terminating null.  (Thus until glibc
2.0.6.  Since glibc 2.1 these
       functions return the  number of characters (excluding the
trailing  null)  which  would  have
       been written to the final string if enough space had been
available.)

Thus, the behavior (as mandated by Single Unix Specification ver 2) is
documented also in the man page.