Book Image

Practical C Programming

By : B. M. Harwani
Book Image

Practical C Programming

By: B. M. Harwani

Overview of this book

Used in everything from microcontrollers to operating systems, C is a popular programming language among developers because of its flexibility and versatility. This book helps you get hands-on with various tasks, covering the fundamental as well as complex C programming concepts that are essential for making real-life applications. You’ll start with recipes for arrays, strings, user-defined functions, and pre-processing directives. Once you’re familiar with the basic features, you’ll gradually move on to learning pointers, file handling, concurrency, networking, and inter-process communication (IPC). The book then illustrates how to carry out searching and arrange data using different sorting techniques, before demonstrating the implementation of data structures such as stacks and queues. Later, you’ll learn interesting programming features such as using graphics for drawing and animation, and the application of general-purpose utilities. Finally, the book will take you through advanced concepts such as low-level programming, embedded software, IoT, and security in coding, as well as techniques for improving code performance. By the end of this book, you'll have a clear understanding of C programming, and have the skills you need to develop robust apps.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Understanding how a buffer overflow occurs

In this recipe, we will learn to get input from the user and will see the situations that lead to a buffer overflow and result in ambiguous output. We will also learn the procedure to avoid a buffer overflow.

Basically, we will make a structure comprising two members and in one of the members, we will deliberately enter text that is larger than its capacity, as a result of which a buffer overflow will occur. This will lead to the overwriting of the content of another member of the structure.

How to do it...

Here are the steps to make a program that will lead to a buffer overflow:

  1. Define a structure consisting of two members, name and orderid.
  2. Define two variables of the structure...