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From: eyal@delta.canberra.edu.au (Eyal Lebedinsky)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Life after free?
Keywords: free malloc
Message-ID: <1990Sep30.002157.7688@csc.canberra.edu.au>
Date: 30 Sep 90 00:21:57 GMT
References: <quan.654410256@sol>
Sender: news@csc.canberra.edu.au
Distribution: comp
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Lines: 29

In article <quan.654410256@sol> quan@sol.surv.utas.oz (Stephen Quan) writes:
>char *funny(ch)
>char ch;
>{
>  char *tmp;
>  int i;
>  
>  tmp = (char *) malloc(100);
>  for (i=0; i<=99 ; i++) *(tmp+i) = ch;
>  free(tmp);
>  return tmp;
>}
>
>Any comments on free-ing tmp before it is return-ed?

I hope this is a serious question. You should not use an area after it is freed.
Not only can it be re-used, but some schemes clobber it when it is added to the
free-list (that is, they use some of it for the memory management). Remember that
some C functions allocate memory implicitly, so you cannot trust your memory
just because you do no mallocs after the free().
>
>Stephen Quan (quan@sol.surv.utas.edu.au)
>University of Tasmania.

Regards
	Eyal
-- 
Regards
	Eyal