structures and allocation

[Micko]

struct person
{
	int age;
	char* name;
};

I've always used to work with this kind of structures like this:

int main ( void )
{
	struct person per;
	/* some code */
	per.name = malloc ( strlen ( "Test" ) + 1 );
	strcpy ( per.name, "Test" )
	/* some code */
}

I always first allocate memory, but often I see this form:

/*...*/
	per.name = "Test"
/*...*/

Is there any problem with the latter way? I think there is but...
Can you comment this?

Thanks

[Quantum1024]

per.name = "Test"

Depending on your compiler "test" may reside in memory that is marked as read only. You shouldn't try to alter this and shouldn't try to free this memory.

[Micko]

That's Ok, but will that cause possible problems with segmentation faults??

[sunnypalsingh]

That's Ok, but will that cause possible problems with segmentation faults??

not untill you try to modify it

[filker0]

To be more specific, every structure references the same copy of the string "test". In many systems, string literals (that is, source-level quoted strings) are stored as read-only data, so any attempt to modify the string will either cause a segmentation fault of some sort or modify the name string for each person struct initialized in this manner.