Thread: Pointer related problem

The following function readline() is used to read the lines from console and store the pointers to each line into the *lineptr[MAXLINES].

Code:

#define MAXLINES 5000
#define MAXLEN    1000

int getline(char *line, int maxlen);
int readlines(char *lineptr[], int maxlines);

char *lineptr[MAXLINES];

int readlines(char *lineptr[], int maxlines)
{
  int len, nlines;
  char *p, line[MAXLEN];
  
  nlines=0;
  while((len=getline(line, MAXLEN)>0)
     if(nlines>=maxlines ||(p=(char *)malloc(len))==NULL)
       return -1;
     else 
     {
       lines[len-1]='\0';/*delete newline*/
       strcpy(p, line);
       lineptr[nlines++]=p;
     }
     return nlines;
}

How can we write this function using only the *lineptr[] but not using the malloc to maintain storage?