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grumpy · May 23rd, 2006, 6:22 AM

You might want to have a look at Dawei's page on pointers, here. Among other things, this page explains that declaring a pointer only declares the pointer. It does not magically, implicitly, or otherwise create something for that pointer to point at.

Or, to put it another way, if you don't explicitly initialise your pointer, it points at a random area of memory. So copying data to it (which strcpy() does to its first argument) is incredibly dangerous.

May 23rd, 2006, 6:22 AM	#5
grumpy Programming Guru Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Adelaide, South Australia Posts: 1,253 Rep Power: 5	You might want to have a look at Dawei's page on pointers, here. Among other things, this page explains that declaring a pointer only declares the pointer. It does not magically, implicitly, or otherwise create something for that pointer to point at. Or, to put it another way, if you don't explicitly initialise your pointer, it points at a random area of memory. So copying data to it (which strcpy() does to its first argument) is incredibly dangerous.