I'm trying to figure out what would happened if I try to free a pointer "from the middle" for example, look at the following code:
char *ptr = (char*)malloc(10*sizeof(char));
for (char i=0 ; i<10 ; ++i)
{
ptr[i] = i+10;
}
++ptr;
++ptr;
++ptr;
++ptr;
free(ptr);
I get a crash with an Unhandled exception error msg. I want to understand why and how free works so that I know not only how to use it but also be able to understand weird errors and exceptions and better debug my codeץ
Thanks a lot
When you malloc a block, it actually allocates a bit more memory than you asked for. This extra memory is used to store information such as the size of the allocated block, and a link to the next free/used block in a chain of blocks, and sometimes some "guard data" that helps the system to detect if you write past the end of your allocated block. Also, most allocators will round up the total size and/or the start of your part of the memory to a multiple of bytes (e.g. on a 64-bit system it may align the data to a multiple of 64 bits (8 bytes) as accessing data from non-aligned addresses can be more difficult and inefficient for the processor/bus), so you may also end up with some "padding" (unused bytes).
When you free your pointer, it uses that address to find the special information it added to the beginning (usually) of your allocated block. If you pass in a different address, it will access memory that contains garbage, and hence its behaviour is undefined (but most frequently will result in a crash)
Later, if you free() the block but don't "forget" your pointer, you may accidentally try to access data through that pointer in the future, and the behaviour is undefined. Any of the following situations might occur:
This is why it is important to make sure you don't use a pointer after freeing the memory it points at - the best practice for this is to set the pointer to NULL after freeing the memory, because you can easily test for NULL, and attempting to access memory via a NULL pointer will cause a bad but consistent behaviour, which is much easier to debug.