Originally Posted by itCbitC how about (de)referencing the pointer before pointing to an invalid location. well from my understanding *ptr2 has to point to a char * pointer type and so i pointed it at ptr because thats exactly what it is: a char * pointer. Same for ptr2... **ptr2 points to a 32-bit address (in a 32-bit system) or four byte char *. Hence it should equal ptr2.