strdup() - what does it do in C?

Question

What is the purpose of the strdup() function in C?

Answer 1

strdup() does dynamic memory allocation for the character array including the end character '\0' and returns the address of the heap memory:

char *strdup (const char *s)
{
    char *p = malloc (strlen (s) + 1);   // allocate memory
    if (p != NULL)
        strcpy (p,s);                    // copy string
    return p;                            // return the memory
}

So, what it does is give us another string identical to the string given by its argument, without requiring us to allocate memory. But we still need to free it, later.