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NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ATTRIBUTES | STANDARDS | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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strverscmp(3) Library Functions Manual strverscmp(3)
strverscmp - compare two version strings
Standard C library (libc, -lc)
#define _GNU_SOURCE /* See feature_test_macros(7) */
#include <string.h>
int strverscmp(const char *s1, const char *s2);
For a dataset like jan1, jan2, ..., jan9, jan10, ... sorting it
lexicographically yields jan1, jan10, ..., jan2, ..., jan9. The
task of strverscmp() is to compare two strings yielding the former
order, while strcmp(3) finds only the lexicographic order. This
function does not use the locale category LC_COLLATE, so is meant
mostly for situations where the strings are expected to be in
ASCII. This is different from the ordering produced by sort(1)
-V.
What this function does is the following. If both strings are
equal, return 0. Otherwise, find the position between two bytes
with the property that before it both strings are equal, while
directly after it there is a difference. Find the largest
consecutive digit strings containing (or starting at, or ending
at) this position. If one or both of these is empty, then return
what strcmp(3) would have returned (numerical ordering of byte
values). Otherwise, compare both digit strings numerically, where
digit strings with one or more leading zeros are interpreted as if
they have a decimal point in front (so that in particular digit
strings with more leading zeros come before digit strings with
fewer leading zeros). Thus, the ordering is 000, 00, 01, 010, 09,
0, 1, 9, 10.
The strverscmp() function returns an integer less than, equal to,
or greater than zero if s1 is found, respectively, to be earlier
than, equal to, or later than s2.
For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see
attributes(7).
┌──────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────┬─────────┐
│ Interface │ Attribute │ Value │
├──────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────┼─────────┤
│ strverscmp() │ Thread safety │ MT-Safe │
└──────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────┴─────────┘
GNU.
The program below can be used to demonstrate the behavior of
strverscmp(). It uses strverscmp() to compare the two strings
given as its command-line arguments. An example of its use is the
following:
$ ./a.out jan1 jan10;
jan1 < jan10
Program source
#define _GNU_SOURCE
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
int res;
if (argc != 3) {
fprintf(stderr, "Usage: %s <string1> <string2>\n", argv[0]);
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
res = strverscmp(argv[1], argv[2]);
printf("%s %s %s\n", argv[1],
(res < 0) ? "<" : (res == 0) ? "==" : ">", argv[2]);
exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}
rename(1), strcasecmp(3), strcmp(3), strcoll(3)
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-6.15.tar.gz
fetched from
⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on
2025-08-11. 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
[email protected]
Linux man-pages 6.15 2025-05-17 strverscmp(3)
Pages that refer to this page: scandir(3), strcmp(3), mount(8), swapon(8)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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