I just did a bunch of research into trying to find out if using strdup() in a patch was reasonable. I finally grepped enough to find strdup in pyconfig.h and configure.in . But that leads to a Brett Newbie Question. Does there happen to be a better way to find out what functions we check for beyond grepping configure.in? The entire reason I bothered to do so much research is I thought we were only supposed to assume ANSI C with POSIX (which, from what I can tell, strdup() is not). But with more Googling and grepping I discovered the meaning of AC_REPLACE_FUNCS() which strdup was being called in configure.in . I would never have known strdup was available to me for code had I not randomly come across this patch and done all of this research. Because of this I would like to list in the Python development guide I am writing up all of the places one can check for info; what configure.in checks for or handles and pyport.h come to mind. It would be nice to have a place that lists all the places one can check for C functionality that are not in the Python/C API directly. If people have other places in the code that one should check please let me know so I can make sure it makes it into the doc and prevents me from having to come up with another Brett Newbie Question. =) -Brett