Today while browsing the (extensive) Glibc documentation, something caught my eye. A function named strfry. Now the expression 'frying a string' conjures up varied images, so I decided to check what it is. Basically it takes a string and replaces it with a pseudorandom anagram of itself in place. I can imagine a few uses for that. But more interesting is what the documentation has to say..
Another interesting one is memfrob. The prototype is similar to memset, but instead of setting everything to 0, it ex-ors each byte with a constant (00101010b). Do it again and you get your original data back. ROT13 for binary data. Nice..
And I am sure there are many gems still hidden, just need to keep looking. But wait, doesn't that also apply to life?
The function addresses the perennial programming quandary: “How do I take good data in string form and painlessly turn it into garbage?". ..for programs based on the GNU C library, theA standard way of destroying data? I mean, these guys are really meticulous. (Thank God for that).strfryfunction is the preferred method for destroying string data.
Another interesting one is memfrob. The prototype is similar to memset, but instead of setting everything to 0, it ex-ors each byte with a constant (00101010b). Do it again and you get your original data back. ROT13 for binary data. Nice..
And I am sure there are many gems still hidden, just need to keep looking. But wait, doesn't that also apply to life?
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