When zeroing a struct such as sockaddr_in, sockaddr_in6 and addrinfo before use, which is correct: memset, an initializer or either?

Question

Whenever I look at real code or example socket code in books, man pages and websites, I almost always see something like:

struct sockaddr_in foo;
memset(&         


        

Answer 1

There shouldn't be a problem with either approach -- the values of the padding bytes shouldn't matter. I suspect that the use of memset() stems from earlier use of the Berkeley-ism bzero(), which may have predated the introduction of struct initializers or been more efficient.