Memory Leak in C When Using Dynamic Arrays with realloc()
I need help solving Can someone help me understand I've been banging my head against this for hours. I'm working with a memory leak in my C application when I try to resize a dynamically allocated array using `realloc()`. I'm using GCC 11.2 on Ubuntu 20.04. When I attempt to increase the size of my integer array, it works fine, but I notice that the memory usage keeps growing during execution, which suggests I'm not releasing memory properly. Here's the core part of my code: ```c #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> int main() { int *array = malloc(5 * sizeof(int)); if (array == NULL) { perror("Failed to allocate memory"); return 1; } for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) { array[i] = i; } // Resize the array to hold 10 integers int *temp = realloc(array, 10 * sizeof(int)); if (temp == NULL) { free(array); // Free the original array if realloc fails perror("Failed to resize array"); return 1; } array = temp; // Update the pointer only if realloc is successful for (int i = 5; i < 10; i++) { array[i] = i; } // Print values for verification for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { printf("%d ", array[i]); } printf("\n"); // Here I should free the memory free(array); return 0; } ``` I run this code and monitor memory usage using `valgrind`, and it reports a definite memory leak: ``` ==12345== 40 bytes in 1 blocks are definitely lost in loss record 1 of 1 ==12345== at 0x4C2D6AE: malloc (vg_replace_malloc.c:309) ==12345== by 0x4C2D6A3: realloc (vg_replace_malloc.c:775) ``` I've ensured that I free the memory at the end of the program. However, I suspect that I'm missing something in how I'm managing the pointer after the `realloc()` call. Could it be that if `realloc()` fails, I'm not handling the original pointer correctly? Any advice on how to fix this would be greatly appreciated! Also, if there are better practices for managing dynamic arrays in C, I'm all ears. This is part of a larger service I'm building. Am I missing something obvious?