GCC memory leak detection equivalent to Microsoft crtdbg.h?

Question

After many years of working on a general-purpose C++ library using the Microsoft MSVC compiler in Visual Studio, we are now porting it to Linux/Mac OS X (pray for us). I hav

Answer 1

You may also find the MALLOC_CHECK_ environment variable useful.

From malloc(3) man page:

Recent versions of Linux libc (later than 5.4.23) and glibc (2.x) include a malloc() implementation which is tunable via environment variables. When MALLOC_CHECK_ is set, a special (less efficient) implementation is used which is designed to be tolerant against simple errors, such as double calls of free() with the same argument, or overruns of a single byte (off-by-one bugs). Not all such errors can be protected against, however, and memory leaks can result. If MALLOC_CHECK_ is set to 0, any detected heap corruption is silently ignored; if set to 1, a diagnostic message is printed on stderr; if set to 2, abort(3) is called immediately; if set to 3, a diagnostic message is printed on stderr and the program is aborted. Using a non-zero MALLOC_CHECK_ value can be useful because otherwise a crash may happen much later, and the true cause for the problem is then very hard to track down.