Question about memory allocation between methods

**kotoko** · 06-16-2008

Maybe this has been answered before but my searches didn't find anything (but I'm not sure if I serched for it with the right key words).

So my question is: If you have a method that creates a instance of a struct (like Data d) and then you fill the attributes with info from the user and in the end of the method you do return d can this be a problem?
My point is when you return a structure created as said in method Data create() and then call it like

Code:

Data* pointer = (Data*)malloc(sizeof(Data));
*pointer = create();

will pointer be pointing to wherever d was stored or does it copy d to the place pointed to by pointer?

**tabstop** · 06-16-2008

Pointer will still be pointing to the same place -- you're not reassigning pointer, you are changing the value of what it points to. You should be fine here (unless data itself contains pointers -- you'll want to make sure those aren't pointing to local variables either).

**QuantumPete** · 06-16-2008

You want something like this:

Code:

int main () {
    Data* pointer = (Data*)malloc(sizeof(Data));
    create (create);
    /* Blah */
}

void create (Data * d) {
   /* Fill (*d) with data */
}

Pass the pointer to your newly allocated memory to the create function, let it do its magic. The way you wrote in your post would overwrite the value of the pointer with whatever create() returns.

QuantumPete

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