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I think that somehow the template constructor for paths takes the entire array passed as argument and not just the null-terminated string inside the array, which may be smaller.
This seems to be bang on, as does Scott's speculation as to how it came about. I made a variation of my original experiment, which demonstrates it: const char * f = "foo"; const char * g = "bar"; char b[10]; strcpy(b, f); strcpy(b + strlen(f) + 1, g); // b contains 'f','o','o',0,'b','a','r', 0, Garbage, Garbage fs::path p1(b); // p1.m_pathname.size = 9 fs::path p2(f); // p1.m_pathname.size = 3 // prints "foo bar?" where ? is 8-bit garbage character cout << p1 << endl; // prints "foo" cout << p2 << endl; cout << (p1 == p2) << endl; // prints 1 The last line proves that in some circumstances the nul byte is ignored, in others it is treated as significant. I am surprised the path class can 'know' the length of a C array. I guess that's the magic of templates for me.
I also got a crash with the attached code on Visual Studio 2008. I have created a track ticket https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/ticket/4677, lets hope someone picks it up.
Top work! Will