Re: best way to deal with macOS deprecation of sprintf?

[Paul Eggert]

On 11/3/22 12:43, Jeffrey Walton wrote:
> Apple deprecated sprintf starting at MacOS 10.12.

Yes, though that change in 10.12 apparently didn't adversely affect 
developers. What appears to be new in 10.13 is that the compiler is now 
warning about calls to sprintf. This is an unnecessary pain.

Saying that snprintf is "more secure" than sprintf is like saying 
strlcpy and strcpy_s are "more secure" than strcpy. (Apple's 
documentation[1] says strlcpy is "fully safe", which is laughably 
wrong.) Functions like these are not "less secure" or "more secure" in 
isolation, because security depends on the overall system, not just 
single functions.

Besides, with sprintf and adequate checking you reliably get a crash 
instead of snprintf's silent truncation, and this is a security win. 
This is one reason I'm not a fan of laboriously going through code and 
replacing sprintf calls with snprintf calls.

[1] 
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Security/Conceptual/SecureCodingGuide/Articles/BufferOverflows.html