Memory Leak When Using `strdup` in C Loop - What Am I Missing?
I'm building a feature where I'm having trouble with I'm trying to debug I'm working with a memory leak when using `strdup` in a loop that processes a list of strings. Here's the relevant snippet of code that I've been working with: ```c #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> void process_strings(char **input, int count) { char **processed = malloc(count * sizeof(char *)); if (processed == NULL) { perror("Failed to allocate memory"); return; } for (int i = 0; i < count; i++) { processed[i] = strdup(input[i]); if (processed[i] == NULL) { perror("Failed to duplicate string"); continue; } } // Do something with processed strings... // Free the memory for processed strings for (int i = 0; i < count; i++) { free(processed[i]); } free(processed); } int main() { char *strs[] = { "hello", "world", "this", "is", "a", "test" }; process_strings(strs, 6); return 0; } ``` When I run this code and use tools like Valgrind, I see messages indicating that there are memory leaks. The output shows that `strdup` is allocating memory, but it seems that not all allocations are being freed, which is puzzling to me because I'm explicitly calling `free` on each processed string. I suspect that the scenario might lie in the way I'm handling the return value of `strdup` within the loop. If `strdup` fails and returns `NULL`, I'm continuing the loop without freeing the previously duplicated strings. But even if `strdup` succeeds, I wonder if there’s a chance of missing any strings that should be freed under certain conditions. Could it be that the way I’m allocating `processed` or how I'm managing the loop is leading to this leak? Any insights or suggestions on how to properly handle memory in this scenario would be greatly appreciated! Also, I'm compiling with GCC version 11.1 on Ubuntu 22.04. I'm using C latest in this project. Is there a simpler solution I'm overlooking? Is there a better approach? The stack includes C and several other technologies.