I forgot to mention that it would be worth researching (reading docs and
man pages) and installing and running it to really understand the
beautiful design.
Also, for this, or any other service where security counts I would
highly recommend using a safe, easy to use string library such as the
one included in libowfat: http://www.fefe.de/libowfat/
The standard C string functions, as the history continues to prove us
(and we continue to ignore it), SUCK for writing secure software. You
don't want to end up with either buffer overflows or string escape
vulnerabilities, etc.