Idiomatic way to find how much space sprintf output would take is len = snprintf(NULL, 0, ...) + 1; Once upon a time there'd been libc implementations that blew chunks on that and somebody had come up with the following "cute" trick: len = snprintf((char *) &len, 1, ...) + 1; for doing the same. However, that's unidiomatic, harder to follow *and* any such libc implementation would violate both C99 and POSIX (since 2001). IOW, this kludge is best buried along with such libc implementations, nevermind getting cargo-culted into newer code. Our vsnprintf() does not suffer that braindamage, TYVM. Acked-by: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@I-love.SAKURA.ne.jp> Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>