Well I guess I'm too isolated from the real world to know about the
long known problems with "gets".
I debugged this on my PC not on Unix.
I loaded a real old version of TC to get the oldest compiler I could
and made a real simple test program using "gets". Sure enough it
caused problems if I entered too many characters. "Strlen" always
reported the string length as 127 no matter how I defined the string
array( char input[25] or char input[128] or char input[1024]. The
string length was always 127 even if I held a key down for 2 minutes,
must be a keyboard buffer limit.
I got an illegal instruction message a couple of times and the TC blew
up a couple of times.
I think the reason I've never encountered this before is that we don't
sell of otherwise distribute our software and it's always used in a
very controlled environment.
I'll go back to the Kernighan & Rithcie book to find a safer command.
Any suggestions?
Thanks for the help.