memcpy - copy memory area
Contents
Attributes
For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see attributes(7).
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────┬─────────┐
│ Interface │ Attribute │ Value │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────┼─────────┤
│ memcpy() │ Thread safety │ MT-Safe │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────┴─────────┘
Caveats
Failure to observe the requirement that the memory areas do not overlap has been the source of
significant bugs. (POSIX and the C standards are explicit that employing memcpy() with overlapping areas
produces undefined behavior.) Most notably, in glibc 2.13 a performance optimization of memcpy() on some
platforms (including x86-64) included changing the order in which bytes were copied from src to dest.
This change revealed breakages in a number of applications that performed copying with overlapping areas.
Under the previous implementation, the order in which the bytes were copied had fortuitously hidden the
bug, which was revealed when the copying order was reversed. In glibc 2.14, a versioned symbol was added
so that old binaries (i.e., those linked against glibc versions earlier than 2.14) employed a memcpy()
implementation that safely handles the overlapping buffers case (by providing an "older" memcpy()
implementation that was aliased to memmove(3)).
Description
The memcpy() function copies n bytes from memory area src to memory area dest. The memory areas must not
overlap. Use memmove(3) if the memory areas do overlap.
History
POSIX.1-2001, C89, SVr4, 4.3BSD.
Library
Standard C library (libc, -lc)
Name
memcpy - copy memory area
Return Value
The memcpy() function returns a pointer to dest.
See Also
bcopy(3), bstring(3), memccpy(3), memmove(3), mempcpy(3), strcpy(3), strncpy(3), wmemcpy(3) Linux man-pages 6.9.1 2024-05-02 memcpy(3)
Standards
C11, POSIX.1-2008.
Synopsis
#include<string.h>void*memcpy(voiddest[restrict.n],constvoidsrc[restrict.n],size_tn);