Hello Ovanes,

This over-allocation is pretty much the same as reserving some space at the end of the data structure to place data together. Am I right? Why isn't it possible to just write char[128] or char[16] instead of char[1]?

I can't change that code because it lives in a system header.

And if you know that this buffer represents some special case, why don't you pass it as such to filesystem? &char[0], than boost::filesystem will not assume it got char[1] and will be looking to '\0' marker...

How would I know that this buffer represents some special case? FTS(3) library documentation says something like that: struct _ftsent { ... char *fts_name; }; But the structure is really defined another way (Linux, Mac OS X): struct _ftsent { ... char fts_name[1]; }; I believe this discrepancy is pretty much negligible anyway. There are huge number of programs utilizing fts(3) APIs and they don't break. Unfortunately boost::filesystem is another story. It does break and it does break silently.