Yet another place where a Linux man page is inaccurate

, but it's still a documented incompatibility with a standard: in glibc, initstate doesn't return NULL on error, despite posix requiring that it does:

// EINVAL: state array less than 8 bytes char *state = initstate(67, (char [1]){}, 1); assert(errno == EINVAL); // ok assert(state == NULL); // fails, despite posix requiring it to succeed

the man page initstate(3) very unhelpfully first describes the posix behavior in the RETURN VALUE section, as though it's the actual behavior:

The initstate() function returns a pointer to the previous state array. On failure, it returns NULL, and errno is set to indicate the error.

only at the very bottom in the BUGS section does it say that glibc behaves differently:

According to POSIX, initstate() should return NULL on error. In the glibc implementation, errno is (as specified) set on error, but the function does not return NULL.

however, i just got an email:

Hi, I read