Free not freeing memory.

Hi everyone,

I've been working on this project for school for the last week now, and I've had this problem that I've been banging my head against for a couple of days now. Functionality of the program isnt an issue, I have that pretty down pat. I am having an issue with dynamic memory allocation. At the top of my program I allocate some memory to store the important data in, and then attempt to free it at the bottom when I am all finished with it. For whatever reason it wont free the memory that has been allocated.

I have tried to figure out what is causing it to not free the memory, however I've had no luck. I've moved around the free() statements, and at some random points it will free it and not free it.
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I have attached my project file containing main(). I would greatly appreciate any help that can be offered, or a pointer in the right direction.
Almost forgot to include this. I am running Ubuntu 9.04 and GCC 4.3.3

Thanks in advance,
Tim

You would probably get more help if you just post your relevant code(in code tag) here.

Quote:

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For whatever reason it wont free the memory that has been allocated.

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First how do you know 'it won't free'? which part of program?
And why your main is returning 1 ?!

You are doing nothing in your code to confirm or deny free isn't working as designed. Are you expecting your variables that point to the allocated memory to be cleared by free?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dino

You are doing nothing in your code to confirm or deny free isn't working as designed. Are you expecting your variables that point to the allocated memory to be cleared by free?

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Running it through valgrind reports that all of the memory allocated has not been freed.

The 'free' function call in C returns void, so how do you know it isn't working? Are you expecting a call to 'free' to make your pointers point to NULL? Is that what makes you think it isn't working? Because if that is the case, a function call to free does not do this.

Edit: didn't see the post you just made when i posted.

Can you try to comment out your processing loop(while loop) and printletterstats() and see if leak still exists?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bayint Naung

Can you try to comment out your processing loop(while loop) and printletterstats() and see if leak still exists?

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Yes I tried to comment out the process and print loops and the memory leak still exists.

You're not including <string.h>. What about the WordUtils.h file?

Ok this is odd. I have this code.

Code:

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int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
        LETTERSTATS *letterStatsArray = (LETTERSTATS*)malloc(sizeof(LETTERSTATS) * 5);
        PANVOWELSTATS *panvowels = (PANVOWELSTATS*)malloc(sizeof(PANVOWELSTATS));
        initializePanvowels(panvowels);
        initializeLetterStats(letterStatsArray , 5);

        freeLetterStats(letterStatsArray , 5);
        free(letterStatsArray);
        freePanvowelStats(panvowels);
        free(panvowels);
        return 0;
}

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Code:

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$ gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 4.4.4 20100630 (Red Hat 4.4.4-10)
Copyright (C) 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

$ valgrind ./a.out
==2094== Memcheck, a memory error detector
==2094== Copyright (C) 2002-2009, and GNU GPL'd, by Julian Seward et al.
==2094== Using Valgrind-3.5.0 and LibVEX; rerun with -h for copyright info
==2094== Command: ./a.out
==2094==
==2094==
==2094== HEAP SUMMARY:
==2094==    in use at exit: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==2094==  total heap usage: 14 allocs, 14 frees, 1,284 bytes allocated
==2094==
==2094== All heap blocks were freed -- no leaks are possible
==2094==
==2094== For counts of detected and suppressed errors, rerun with: -v
==2094== ERROR SUMMARY: 0 errors from 0 contexts (suppressed: 12 from 8)

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Maybe did you forget to re-compile after making changes?

Hmm that is indeed odd. What OS and Compiler are you using?

I would get rid of the dynamically allocated word variable in main and just use a standard character array. You're using it as a buffer anyway, so there's no good reason to dynamically allocate it.

I noticed the following issues in your program after a quick scan of the code:

• You don't fclose() inFile. Since FILE* pointers usually involve some dynamic memory allocations, this is probably a memory leak.
• If the file cannot be opened you return immediately without freeing letterStatsArray or panvowels.
• Although you execute "(p+i) -> totalChars += 1;", I never see totalChars initialized anywhere. Remember that malloc() won't necessarily give you zeroed memory; memory allocated with malloc() can be initialized to anything whatsoever.
• Same issue with shortest and longest. You malloc() memory for them, but you never set the memory to anything and then you go and execute
  
  Code:

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  if(strlen(word) < strlen((p+i) ->shortest))

  ---

  This will access uninitialized memory and it will be undefined.
• If argv[1] does not exist you will be asking fopen() to open the file NULL, which probably won't go over well.
• It's a bad idea to hard-code 5 and 101 everywhere.
• Because of the way you've created letters[], it's not a standard C string because it does not have a NULL string terminator. I didn't see any code that actually did something wrong, but you should be very careful with this because if you so much as called strlen(letters) you'd have a buffer overrun.

Also, this is a bit useless, don't you think? :)

Code:

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const int wordLength;

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[edit] Wow, there were about five posts while I was typing this up. Guess it wasn't much of a "quick scan" after all. I think most of my points are still relevant though. [/edit]

Some third party libraries and even the C runtime can actually leak memory. Can you post the Valgrind output that you think is the proof of a memory leak?

Valgrind should tell you to “Rerun with --leak-check=full to see details of leaked memory”... so why not try that?

memory leak != free() not working.