Program aborts when using strcpy on a char pointer? (Works fine on char array)

Question

I\'m perplexed as to why the following doesn\'t work:

char * f = \"abcdef\";
strcpy(f, \"abcdef\");
printf(\"%s\",f);

char s[] = \"ffffd\";
strcpy(&s[0],          


        

Answer 1

String literals are considered readonly by most compilers, so the memory where they reside can be marked as readonly, resulting in a runtime error.

To make it work, do the following:

char * f = strdup("abcdef");
strcpy(f, "abcdef");
printf("%s",f);
free(f);

This creates a modifiable copy of the string in the heap memory, which needs to get freed at the end of your program of course.