Life after free?

[Eyal Lebedinsky]

In article <quan.654410256 at sol> quan at 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 at sol.surv.utas.edu.au)
>University of Tasmania.

Regards
	Eyal
-- 
Regards
	Eyal