advanced patterns When Using `malloc` with Structs in C - Memory Not Allocating as Expected
I'm attempting to set up I'm converting an old project and I'm working on a personal project and Quick question that's been bugging me - I'm currently working with an scenario with dynamic memory allocation for a struct in C..... I have a struct defined as follows: ```c typedef struct { int id; char name[50]; } Person; ``` In my `main` function, I attempt to allocate memory for an array of `Person` structs like this: ```c int main() { int numPersons = 5; Person *people = malloc(numPersons * sizeof(Person)); if (people == NULL) { fprintf(stderr, "Memory allocation failed\n"); return 1; } // Initializing the first person people[0].id = 1; strcpy(people[0].name, "Alice"); printf("ID: %d, Name: %s\n", people[0].id, people[0].name); free(people); return 0; } ``` When I run the program, I sometimes get a segmentation fault on the line where I'm trying to copy the name using `strcpy`. I've checked that `numPersons` is set correctly and that `malloc` is returning a valid pointer. However, when I increase `numPersons` to 10, the program crashes with a different behavior altogether. This leads me to believe there might be an scenario with how memory is being accessed or allocated. I've also tried replacing `strcpy` with a manual loop to copy each character, but this doesn't help either. Additionally, I've compiled the code with `gcc -Wall -Wextra` and the warnings point out that `strcpy` might overwrite the buffer, but I thought my array size was sufficient. Is there something I'm missing here regarding the memory allocation for structures? Could it be an alignment scenario, or am I simply mishandling the allocation and initialization process? Any insights would be appreciated! My development environment is macOS. What's the best practice here? This is part of a larger desktop app I'm building. Any feedback is welcome! For reference, this is a production service. I've been using C for about a year now. Could this be a known issue? This issue appeared after updating to C latest.