👀 Views: 87 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-01

memory-management c valgrind C

I tried several approaches but none seem to work. I'm encountering a memory leak issue in my C program that involves custom string manipulation functions. I've created a `my_strdup` function to duplicate strings, but when I run my program, it always reports that there's a memory leak. I’m using `valgrind` to check for memory issues and it shows that the memory allocated by `my_strdup` is not being freed. Here's a simplified version of my code: ```c #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> char* my_strdup(const char* str) { size_t len = strlen(str) + 1; // +1 for the null terminator char* dup = malloc(len); if (dup) { memcpy(dup, str, len); } return dup; } int main() { char* original = "Hello, World!"; char* copy = my_strdup(original); printf("Copied string: %s\n", copy); // I forgot to free the copy here return 0; } ``` In the `main` function, I'm duplicating a string but neglecting to free the duplicate after I'm done using it. I understand that this is likely the cause of the memory leak, but I want to confirm if that's the correct diagnosis and if there are best practices for managing memory in such cases. Additionally, I’m unsure whether I should implement a custom `my_free` function to encapsulate freeing logic for the duplicates created by `my_strdup`, or if I should just remember to free them in each calling function. When I run `valgrind`, I see output similar to: ``` ==12345== LEAK SUMMARY: ==12345== definitely lost: 13 bytes in 1 blocks ==12345== indirectly lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks ==12345== possibly lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks ==12345== still reachable: 0 bytes in 0 blocks ==12345== suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks ``` Any suggestions on how to resolve this memory leak issue effectively? How would you solve this?