Null Pointer

NULL is a character or pointer value. If a pointer, then the pointer variable does not reference
any object (i.e. a pointer to nothing). It is usual for functions which return pointers to return
NULL if they failed in some way. The return value can be tested. See the section on fopen for an
example of this.

NULL is returned by read commands of the gets family when they try to read beyond the end of
an input file.

Where it is used as a character, NULL is commonly written as '\0'. It is the string termination
character which is automatically appended to any strings in your C program. You usually need
not bother about this final \0', since it is handled automatically. However it sometimes makes a
useful target to terminate a string search. There is an example of this in the string_length
function example in the section on Functions in C.