Can I rely on malloc returning NULL?

Question

I read that on Unix systems, malloc can return a non-NULL pointer even if the memory is not actually available, and trying to use the memory later on will trigg

Answer 1

To view this from an alternative point of view:

"malloc can return a non-NULL pointer even if the memory is not actually available" does not mean that it always returns non-NULL. There might (and will) be cases where NULL is returned (as others already said), so this check is necessary nevertheless.