Why does this intentionally incorrect use of strcpy not fail horribly?

Question

Why does the below C code using strcpy work just fine for me? I tried to make it fail in two ways:

1) I tried strcpy from a string literal

Answer 1

As @Als said, this is undefined behaviour. This may crash, but it doesn't have to.

Many memory managers allocate in larger chunks of memory and then hand it to the "user" in smaller chunks, probably a mutliple of 4 or 8 bytes. So your write over the boundary probably simply writes into the extra bytes allocated. Or it overwrites one of the other variables you have.