This document is a Mac OS X manual page. Manual pages are a command-line technology for providing documentation. You can view these manual pages locally using the man(1) command. These manual pages come from many different sources, and thus, have a variety of writing styles.

For more information about the manual page format, see the manual page for manpages(5).

STRCMP(3)                BSD Library Functions Manual                STRCMP(3)

NAME
     strcmp, strncmp -- compare strings

LIBRARY
     Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS
     #include <string.h>

     int
     strcmp(const char *s1, const char *s2);

     int
     strncmp(const char *s1, const char *s2, size_t n);

DESCRIPTION
     The strcmp() and strncmp() functions lexicographically compare the null-terminated strings s1 and s2.

     The strncmp() function compares not more than n characters.  Because strncmp() is designed for compar-ing comparing
     ing strings rather than binary data, characters that appear after a `\0' character are not compared.

RETURN VALUES
     The strcmp() and strncmp() return an integer greater than, equal to, or less than 0, according as the
     string s1 is greater than, equal to, or less than the string s2.  The comparison is done using unsigned
     characters, so that `\200' is greater than `\0'.

SEE ALSO
     bcmp(3), memcmp(3), strcasecmp(3), strcoll(3), strxfrm(3)

STANDARDS
     The strcmp() and strncmp() functions conform to ISO/IEC 9899:1990 (``ISO C90'').

BSD                            October 11, 2001                            BSD