Free a link list

[EvilBaby]

To free the memory of a link list so I have to travel though each node and free it?

[quzah]

To free the memory of a link list so I have to travel though each node and free it?

Of course you do. For every malloc call, you need a free call.

Quzah.

[EvilBaby]

Of course you do. For every malloc call, you need a free call.

Quzah.

damn, my link list is 45 000 + links, this is gonna take a while

[EvilBaby]

just out of curiosity should this work

while (current != NULL)
{
	if (current->next != NULL)
	{
		temp = current->next;
		free (current);
		current = temp;
	}
	else
		free(current);
}

[Hammer]

Normally you'd do something like this

while (current)
{
  temp = current->next;
  free(current);
  current = temp;
}

[Prelude]

>damn, my link list is 45 000 + links, this is gonna take a while
45,000+ really isn't that much for any realistic application.

[EvilBaby]

thanks for the help

[EvilBaby]

>damn, my link list is 45 000 + links, this is gonna take a while
45,000+ really isn't that much for any realistic application.

it is when you were tyring to do it the way I originally thought I had to. See I'm new at this so I started off by going to the last element, free, that, then go through the list to the last element again and free that and do that over 45 000 times.


However I soon realized there was a much better way of doing it and as it turns out I was almost right.

[Thantos]

Yea if you are trying to free the last element everytime it'll take a while. The "standard" way is to free the head.

[Prelude]

>Yea if you are trying to free the last element everytime it'll take a while
Only if you don't have a tail pointer and a double linked list or a suitable single linked setup for tail deletion.

>I started off by going to the last element, free
Yikes. Yes, that would be rather inefficient for a list of that size.

[Thantos]

hmm have to remember the tail pointer idea.

[quzah]

And just because...

void nocircularlistsplease(struct node*n)
{
    if(n&&n->next)
        nocircularlistsplease(n->next);
    free(n);
}

But on a very big list you may run out of stack space.

Quzah.