Comment by tlb

Beware of the "correct" solutions proposed here.

  // OK: correctly copy src
  char dest[8];
  strncpy(dest, src, sizeof(dest) - 1);

With a long src, it fails to null-terminate dest. dest[7] will be whatever the contents of uninitialized memory were, so reading dest as a string is likely to run past the end.

strlcpy has a better API, though sadly it's not standard on Linux.