cc [ flag ... ] file ... -lgen [ library ... ]
#include <libgen.h>

char *copylist(const char *filenm, off_t *szptr);

The copylist() function copies a list of items from a file into freshly allocated memory, replacing new-lines with null characters. It expects two arguments: a pointer filenm to the name of the file to be copied, and a pointer szptr to a variable where the size of the file will be stored.

Upon success, copylist() returns a pointer to the memory allocated. Otherwise it returns NULL if it has trouble finding the file, calling malloc(), or reading the file.

The copylist() function has a transitional interface for 64-bit file offsets. See lf64(5).

Example 1 Example of copylist() function.

/* read "file" into buf */
off_t size;
char *buf;
buf = copylist("file", &size);
if (buf) {
 for (i=0; i<size; i++)
 if (buf[i])
 putchar(buf[i]);
 else
 putchar('\en');
 }
} else {
 fprintf(stderr, "%s: Copy failed for "file".\en", argv[0]);
 exit (1);
}

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

malloc(3C), attributes(5), lf64(5)

When compiling multithreaded applications, the _REENTRANT flag must be defined on the compile line. This flag should only be used in multithreaded applications.