Re: [PATCH] sort.c: Fix minor memory leak, "files" is never free'd

[Joey Degges]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 5:05 AM, Eric Blake <address@hidden> wrote:

> According to Joey Degges on 2/16/2010 2:02 AM:
> > Hello,
> >
> > At sort.c:3271 'files' is allocated but it is not free'd before main
> exits:
> >     files = xnmalloc (argc, sizeof *files);
>
> Thanks for the patches.  However, calling free() immediately before exit()
> is a lint-like activity - it is actually SLOWER to explicitly free memory
> rather than just exiting and letting the OS cleanup reclaim the memory as
> part of process death.  If we accept patches like this, it will be to make
> other leak detections easier, but as such, it should probably be properly
> guarded by #if LINT or something similar to make it apparent that it is
> only needed when looking for leaks and not in the common case.


Thanks for your insight -- I was not aware of 'lint' before. I have
reformatted the patch with #ifdef lint so that this will only be used if
gcc-warnings is enabled. If this looks good I will also resubmit the other
two patches.

>From 0018a314269bc8a9b89e82be2cbf17a08d28f297 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Joey Degges <address@hidden>
Date: Mon, 15 Feb 2010 23:30:31 -0800
Subject: [PATCH 1/3] sort.c: Fix minor memory leak, 'files' is never free'd

---
 src/sort.c |    5 +++++
 1 files changed, 5 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

diff --git a/src/sort.c b/src/sort.c
index 481fdb8..a2cba05 100644
--- a/src/sort.c
+++ b/src/sort.c
@@ -3692,6 +3692,11 @@ main (int argc, char **argv)
   else
     sort (files, nfiles, outfile);

+#ifdef lint
+  if (nfiles != 0)
+    free (files);
+#endif
+
   if (have_read_stdin && fclose (stdin) == EOF)
     die (_("close failed"), "-");

-- 
1.6.6.1


Thanks,
Joey