What's the point of malloc(0)?

Question

I just saw this code:

artist = (char *) malloc(0);

...and I was wondering why would one do this?

Answer 1

According to Reed Copsey answer and the man page of malloc , I wrote some examples to test. And I found out malloc(0) will always give it a unique value. See my example :

char *ptr;
if( (ptr = (char *) malloc(0)) == NULL )
    puts("Got a null pointer");
else
    puts("Got a valid pointer");

The output will be "Got a valid pointer", which means ptr is not null.