strdupa(3)

✨ NAME ✨

strdupa — string duplicate but make it alloca 💅

okay so bestie, real talk: this is the manual page for strdupa(3), living in the Library Functions Manual section. she's a little chaotic, she's stack-allocated, and she is absolutely not your normal strdup. let's get into it 🫶

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📚 LIBRARY 📚

Standard C library — that's libc, link her with -lc 🎀

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

#define _GNU_SOURCE  /* See feature_test_macros(7) */
#include <string.h>

char *strdupa(const char *s);

yes bestie you read that right, you need that #define _GNU_SOURCE up top or she simply will not show up. check feature_test_macros(7) for the whole lore on that one 👑

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

So. strdupa() is giving strdup(3) energy, except instead of malloc-ing your buffer, she uses alloca(3) to allocate it. same vibe, different memory neighborhood 🏘️

She is literally exactly equivalent to:

strcpy(alloca(strlen(s) + 1), s)

like that's it. that's the whole function. no cap. 🔥

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🎁 RETURN VALUE 🎁

On success, this macro hands you back a pointer to the duplicated string. slay. ✨

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🦋 ATTRIBUTES 🦋

For the deets on what all these terms even mean, go peek at attributes(7).

• Interface: strdupa()
• Attribute: Thread safety
• Value: MT-Safe 👑

so yes bestie, she's MT-Safe, she can hang with the threads 💅

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🌸 STANDARDS 🌸

GNU. that's it, that's the standard. periodt. 🎀

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⭐ HISTORY ⭐

Also GNU. iconic behavior, honestly. 💜

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💀 CAVEATS 💀

Go read alloca(3). seriously. this is not me being cute, this is me being real with you. everything terrifying about stack allocation applies here and she's not gonna say it twice 🙈

bestie I am begging you, read alloca(3) before you ship this. stack memory does not play nice and it does not warn you first 😭

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• string(3)
• alloca(3)
• strdup(3)

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! this one's from Linux man-pages 6.20, dated 2026-08-10, filed under strdupa(3). go forth and duplicate responsibly 🧚💖