Common Errors

Memory leaks

We’ve already discussed memory leaks quite extensively. However, this is such an important concept that we’ll reiterate it. Pretty much everyone can write code with dynamic memory allocations, but not everyone can write it correctly.

Let’s look at the case of strdup and investigate a memory leak. In the following code, we duplicate a string using strdup, but we never free the memory. Recall that strdup dynamically allocates a copy and returns it to the caller, which is responsible for freeing the memory.