Freeing pointers in structures

Hi,

I've written a program that uses a large amount of memory. This involves many linked lists made up of structures that contain pointers such as

Struct apple{
int *shell;
int *core;
int pips;
int *next;
}
These pointers are used during the execution with allocation calls to malloc.

My question is that when I free a structure like this can I just free the pointer to the structure (e.g. to free the next record of the linked list could I just call free on apple->next) or do I have to free all the pointers in the structure first.

thanks for any help

Jim

You should free all the pointers in the head node (except for next), then free the head node itself and move on to the next node in the list.

first clear all the pointers in the structures and then clear the pointer to the structure

just curious...but any reason why u're using pointers to ints instead of just having straight out integers.

if u're gonna be using pointers anyways...why not making void *, u could use them then to point to different data types.

just a thought.

>but any reason why u're using pointers to ints instead of just
>having straight out integers.

If shell and core are dynamically created lists of ints.

>if u're gonna be using pointers anyways...why not making void
>*, u could use them then to point to different data types.

Could be, but why do that in case you already know you're always going to use ints?