Manual Pages  — BZERO

bzero, explicit_bzero – write zeroes to a byte string

LIBRARY SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION SEE ALSO HISTORY

Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

#include <strings.h>

void
bzero(void *b, size_t len);

void
explicit_bzero(void *b, size_t len);

The bzero() function writes len zero bytes to the string b. If len is zero, bzero() does nothing.

The explicit_bzero() variant behaves the same, but will not be removed by a compiler's dead store optimization pass, making it useful for clearing sensitive memory such as a password.