strdup or _strdup?

Question

When I use strdup in Microsoft Visual C++, it warns me:

warning C4996: \'strdup\': The POSIX name for this item is deprecated. Instead, u

Answer 1

Which is correct?

strdup is a perfectly correct POSIX function. Nevertheless, it doesn't belong to the standard, and the ANSI C standard reserves some (broad) classes of function names for further use. Among these, there are

• Function names that begin with str and a lowercase letter

therefore, the MS guys decided to replace strdup with _strdup.

I'd just continue using strdup. It's unlikely the C committee will define strdup to something else than POSIX. Either #define strdup _strdup or silence the warning.

BTW I hope you see this applies to your functions with names like string_list etc., too.