👀 Views: 55 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-07

c memory-management debugging C

Could someone explain This might be a silly question, but I'm experiencing a `double free or corruption` behavior while trying to manage dynamic memory allocation in my C program. My program allocates an array of structures and then attempts to free them, but I'm not sure where I went wrong. Here's a simplified version of my code: ```c #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> typedef struct { int id; char name[50]; } Item; int main() { int n = 10; Item *items = malloc(n * sizeof(Item)); if (!items) { perror("Failed to allocate memory"); return EXIT_FAILURE; } for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) { items[i].id = i; snprintf(items[i].name, sizeof(items[i].name), "Item %d", i); } // Intentionally clearing the allocated memory free(items); items = NULL; // Avoid dangling pointer // Some other logic here // Freeing again (accidentally) free(items); // This line causes the behavior return EXIT_SUCCESS; } ``` I thought setting `items` to `NULL` after freeing it would prevent any issues, but I still receive the behavior message. I also tried checking for a null pointer before freeing, and this did not seem to help. My compiler is GCC version 11.2.0 on Ubuntu 20.04. Can anyone help identify what I might be missing or doing incorrectly when managing this memory? My development environment is Linux. This is my first time working with C LTS. I'm open to any suggestions. My team is using C for this microservice. Has anyone else encountered this?