K&R Exercise 1.16 - Limitation on line length

Question

I\'m learning C from K&R\'s \"The C Programming Language\" book. I\'m doing the exercises specified in the book. I\'m on exercise number 1.16, but I don\'t understand it

Answer 1

I want to offer that this exercise actually makes more sense if imagine that the limit of the number of characters you can copy is very small -- say, 100 characters -- and that your program is supposed to judge between lines that are longer than that limit.

(If you actually change the limit so that it's very small, the code becomes easier to test: if it picks out the first line that hits that small limit, you'll know your code isn't working, whereas if it returns the first however-many characters of the longest line, it's working.)

Keep the part of the code that copies and counts characters until it hits a newline or EOF or the line-size-limit. Add code that picks up where this counting and copying leaves off, and which will keep counting even after the copying has stopped, so long as getchar() still hasn't returned an EOF or a newline.