memchr(3) — Linux manual page

NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ATTRIBUTES | STANDARDS | HISTORY | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

memchr(3)                Library Functions Manual               memchr(3)

NAME         top

       memchr - memory search character

LIBRARY         top

       Standard C library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS         top

       #include <string.h>  // see memory.h(3head)

       void *memchr(size_t n;
                    const void s[n], int c, size_t n);

DESCRIPTION         top

       memchr() scans the initial n bytes of the memory area pointed to
       by s for the first instance of c.

       Both c and the bytes of the memory area pointed to by s are
       interpreted as unsigned char.

RETURN VALUE         top

       memchr() returns a pointer to the matching byte or NULL if the
       character does not occur in the given memory area.

ATTRIBUTES         top

       For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see
       attributes(7).
       ┌──────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────┬─────────┐
       │ Interface                            Attribute     Value   │
       ├──────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────┼─────────┤
       │ memchr()                             │ Thread safety │ MT-Safe │
       └──────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────┴─────────┘

STANDARDS         top

       C11, POSIX.1-2008.

HISTORY         top

       POSIX.1-2001, C89, SVr4, 4.3BSD.

SEE ALSO         top

       memory.h(3head), memrchr(3), wmemchr(3)

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the man-pages (Linux kernel and C library
       user-space interface documentation) project.  Information about
       the project can be found at 
       ⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩.  If you have a bug report
       for this manual page, see
       ⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩.
       This page was obtained from the tarball man-pages-6.19.tar.gz
       fetched from
       ⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on
       2026-09-09.  If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
       version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-
       to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
       improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
       part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

Linux man-pages 6.19            2026-08-10                      memchr(3)

Pages that refer to this page: ffs(3)memory.h(3head)memrchr(3)rawmemchr(3)strchr(3)wmemchr(3)signal-safety(7)