Memory freeing after exec call?

This is for a school project, and I am looking for guidence on going about freeing memory of a parameter to an exec call. This isn't the point of the project, just a detail I am stuck on planning out. Its a license manager, only letting a specified number of process run at a time.

It gets a line of text (char*) that I parse into an argv type array, char* arr[]. arr[0] is the command, and the rest of it are parameters.

The array is made using malloc and calloc, so its memory that needs to be free'ed at some point. Code written for previous project, what we have to use.

After I get this array arr, I call fork, then have the child call execvp(arr[0], arr). At that point, execution passes to the command in arr[0].

I am wondering how I could go about making sure the memory is free'ed when the command is finished, short of a whole other control structure just tracking these arrays, unless I'm missing an STL that will do what I need.

Only thing I have found so far is atexit(), but will it still work after the exec? I'm not at a point to test this myself yet, wondering if others have played with it.

Anyone have pointers on how I could handle this, if atexit isn't the way?

Seth

hmm, cant you free the memory right after the execvp() call? Im pretty sure the command line arguments get copied for the new process, so you dont have to worry about it finishing before you free the memory.

No, execvp overwrites the program on the stack with the command it was given.

execvp(cmd, args); // This runs.
fprintf(stderr, "Error, execvp failed."); // This line never runs, unless the previous command fails.

Seth

Yes, I was talking about the parent process.

Something like this:

Code:

---

// malloc some memory here
if(!fork())
  execvp();  // child process
else
  // free memory here in parent process

---

Yeah, but no guarentee that you free it after the child is all done with it, unless I'm jsut not thinking straight due to lack of sleep. But real close to what I came up with. It really helped to write the problem down.

Parent forks child, then continues doing whatever.

Child forks again. New child execvp's, New Parent does a wait, then free's memory. Thats my story and I'm sticking to it.

Seth