Can you determine if a string if freeable in C? [duplicate]

Answer 1

If you know something about the memory map of your program at execution time, then you might be able to do something. A better idea is to do proper memory management, though.

Answer 2

I don't think the standard has anything for checking whether a pointer was returned by malloc or not (and you're only supposed to pass those to free) so I'd say no, you can't find that out. You'll have to keep track of it yourself.

Answer 3

There is no portable way. However, since most implementations allocate heap objects in a different memory region than literal (string) data, it is possible to make an educated guess if a given string pointer falls within either region.

static char    x;

bool isStatic(const void *p)
{
    const char *  cp = (const char *)p;

    // Check if the pointer falls within +/-16K of 'x'
    if (cp-16*1024 <= &x  &&  &x <= cp+16*1024)
        return true;
    else
        return false;
}

Obviously, this is a bit of a hack. A much better way would be to directly access the .bss, .data, and .text addresses (these are Unix, Win32 is similar) of your executable after it is loaded into memory, and compare your pointers to those regions.

Answer 4

You can write a wrapper for malloc that tracks the addresses of the memory that was allocated. Then in your free function you can see if that memory is on the list.

Aside from that you might be able to play around with the heap but it won't be even remotely portable.

but why not build GC of some sort or use a GC library.

Answer 5

No. In C, you have to keep track of what you've allocated yourself.

Some malloc implementations (such as dlmalloc) provide some extra functionality for inspecting the heap, but you shouldn't rely on those. dlmalloc has the function dlmalloc_inspect_all, which will walk the heap and return to you all of the regions of memory that malloc has allocated, except for memory-mapped chunks. So you could use that to test if a pointer points to a non-memory-mapped allocation, but it's still a bad idea in general.

And on Windows, don't even think about using [IsBadReadPtr] to test if a pointer points to readable memory or not -- it should really be called CrashProgramRandomly.