comp.lang.c Frequently Asked Questions

This collection of hypertext pages is Copyright 1995-2005 by Steve Summit.
Content from the book "C Programming FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions"
(Addison-Wesley, 1995, ISBN 0-201-84519-9) is made available here by
permission of the author and the publisher as a service to the community.
It is intended to complement the use of the published text
and is protected by international copyright laws.
The on-line content may be accessed freely for personal use
but may not be published or retransmitted without explicit permission.

This page is the top of an HTML version of the Usenet
comp.lang.c Frequently Asked Questions list
(also known as the "clc FAQ").
An FAQ list is a collection of questions commonly asked on Usenet,
together with presumably definitive answers,
provided in an attempt to keep repeated questions
on the newsgroup
down to a low background drone
so that discussion can move on to more interesting matters.
Since they distill knowledge gleaned from many sources
and answer questions which are demonstrably Frequent,
FAQ lists serve as useful references
outside of their originating Usenet newsgroups.
This list is, I dare to claim, no exception,
and the HTML version you're looking at now,
as well as other versions referenced
just below
are intended to be useful to C programmers everywhere.

Several
other versions
of this FAQ list are available,
including a
book-length version
published by
Addison-Wesley.
(The book, though longer,
also has a few more errors;
I've prepared an
errata list.)
See also question 20.40.

These pages are synchronized with
the posted Usenet version
and the Addison-Wesley book version.
Since not all questions appear in all versions,
the question numbers are not always contiguous.

[Note to web authors, catalogers, and bookmarkers:
the URL <http://www.c-faq.com/> is
the right way to link to these pages.
All other URL's implementing this collection
are subject to change.]

You can browse these pages in several ways.
The table of contents below is of the list's major
sections; these links lead to sub-lists of the questions for
those sections.
The ``all questions'' link leads to a list of
all the questions; each question is (obviously) linked to its answer.
The ``section at a time'' link
arranges that
all the questions in each major section are

downloaded to your browser on
one ``page'',

rather than having
each question/answer pair appear on its own page.

In either case,
the ``read sequentially'' link leads to the first
question; you can then follow the ``next'' link at
the bottom of each question's page to read through all of the
questions and answers sequentially.

Steve Summit

scs@eskimo.com

section at a time

1. Declarations and Initializations

2. Structures, Unions, and Enumerations

3. Expressions

4. Pointers

5. Null Pointers

6. Arrays and Pointers

7. Memory Allocation

8. Characters and Strings

9. Boolean Expressions and Variables

10. C Preprocessor

11. ANSI/ISO Standard C

12. Stdio

13. Library Functions

14. Floating Point

15. Variable-Length Argument Lists

16. Strange Problems

17. Style

18. Tools and Resources

19. System Dependencies

20. Miscellaneous

Glossary

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

All Questions

Read Sequentially