how to measure memory

Hi,

I was wondering if there exists a function to measure memory on linux OS for a given c++ function. So, what i have is a situation where a person claims that some function he/she wrote needs 20n words of memory to do something. however this function is quite complex and calls some other functions and so on. So i was hoping that there is a way to measure roughly if the memory statement is correct or not.

So my question is: is something like that possible? Is there a function that i can call to see how much memory was consumed during its execution.

Example

Code:

mem-measure_stat( functio(input) ); cout << mem-measure_stat() << endl;

where as a result I would get a memory consumption peak for this function

thnx

baxy