👀 Views: 79 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-12

c memory-management segmentation-fault C

I'm having a hard time understanding Can someone help me understand I've been researching this but I've looked through the documentation and I'm still confused about I'm working on a project and hit a roadblock......... I'm encountering a segmentation fault when trying to return a local array from a function. The function is supposed to populate an array with values based on input parameters, but when I attempt to access the returned array in the main function, I receive a segmentation fault. Here's my code: ```c #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> int* createArray(int size) { int array[size]; // Local array for (int i = 0; i < size; i++) { array[i] = i * 2; } return array; // Returning address of local array } int main() { int size = 5; int* myArray = createArray(size); for (int i = 0; i < size; i++) { printf("%d ", myArray[i]); } printf("\n"); return 0; } ``` When I run this code, I get the following output before the segmentation fault: ``` Segmentation fault (core dumped) ``` I read up on returning local arrays and noticed that the array goes out of scope once the function completes. I tried using dynamic memory allocation with `malloc`, but I’m not sure how to implement it correctly. Here's what I attempted: ```c int* createArray(int size) { int* array = (int*)malloc(size * sizeof(int)); if (array == NULL) { fprintf(stderr, "Memory allocation failed\n"); exit(1); } for (int i = 0; i < size; i++) { array[i] = i * 2; } return array; // Now returning pointer to dynamically allocated array } ``` This version compiles and runs without crashing, but I ended up with a memory leak since I forgot to `free` the allocated memory. What is the best practice here? How can I return a dynamically allocated array properly and avoid memory leaks in C? What's the best practice here? My development environment is macOS. What's the best practice here? This is happening in both development and production on macOS. Any examples would be super helpful. This is my first time working with C LTS. What's the correct way to implement this? I'm working in a Linux environment. For context: I'm using C on CentOS. Hoping someone can shed some light on this. This is part of a larger mobile app I'm building. Hoping someone can shed some light on this.