Question

8. Write few lines of code that creates two arrays with malloc. Then write a statement that can create a memory leak. Discuss why you think your code has a memory leak by drawing the status of the memory after you use malloc and the line of the code you claim that creates a memory leak.

(C Programming)

Answer 1

Creating the two dynamic arrays :

int *array1 = (int *) malloc(sizeof(int));
int *array2 = (int *) malloc(sizeof(int));

Now, the code for memory leak could be like this :

int *array1;
int *array2;
int n = 100;
for(int i = 0; i< n; i++)
{
     array1 = (int *) malloc(sizeof(int));
     array2 = (int *) malloc(sizeof(int));
     // Allocation is done and we havn't free the space and now we'll try to assign the some   values in the location of array1 and array2, this will cause memory leak.
     *array1 = i * 10;
     *array2 = i % 10;
}

If you want to avoid the case of memory leak always free the memory you allocated for any purpose then you can perform another task at that location,

So the updated code after avoiding the memory leak would be:

 int *array1 = (int *) malloc(sizeof(int));
 int *array2 = (int *) malloc(sizeof(int));
 free(array1);
 free(array2);
 *array1 = 1000;
 *array2 = 9;

Answer 2