Re: Is malloc()ed storage freed upon program termination?

Article View: comp.std.c

Article #4056

#4056

From: Dan Pop
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 1995 10:59

23 lines
1426 bytes

In <811549923.10778@contech.demon.co.uk> sbehrens@contech.demon.co.uk (Soenke Behrens) writes:

>jimh@earth.execpc.com (Jim Hennessy) wrote:
>
>>Does the C standard guarantee that storage allocated by malloc() is
>>freed during program termination?  If so, where?  I can't find it.
>
>Nope, this is not guaranteed. You _have_ to free all allocated memory
>yourself. A good strategy would be to work out (before you start coding)
>who is allowed to allocate memory, and who frees it again. A tool like
>memcheck does wonders, too.

Even if you free it yourself, there is no guarantee that the memory will
be returned to the system after program termination.  As it has already
been pointed out, the standard doesn't attempt to specify what happens
_after_ program termination.

Dan
--
Dan Pop
CERN, CN Division
Email: Dan.Pop@mail.cern.ch 
Mail:  CERN - PPE, Bat. 31 R-004, CH-1211 Geneve 23, Switzerland

Technical Details

Message-ID: <danpop.811594781@rscernix>

Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!CERN.ch!rscernix!danpop

References: <43l16d$3dp@homer.alpha.net> <811549923.10778@contech.demon.co.uk>

Show Full Headers

Complete Article Headers

Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!CERN.ch!rscernix!danpop
From: Dan.Pop@mail.cern.ch (Dan Pop)
Subject: Re: Is malloc()ed storage freed upon program termination?
X-Nntp-Posting-Host: ues5.cern.ch
Message-ID: <danpop.811594781@rscernix>
Sender: news@news.cern.ch (USENET News System)
Organization: CERN European Lab for Particle Physics
X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.0 #7 (NOV)
References: <43l16d$3dp@homer.alpha.net> <811549923.10778@contech.demon.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 1995 10:59:41 GMT

Reply to Parent Message