CODEWITHSUNDEEP
carrayspointersmemory
Darin Beaudreau
Darin Beaudreau

Reputation: 391

Freeing an array of character pointers (string literals)?

I'm trying to figure out how to free the memory for an array of character pointers (string literals), but I can't quite get the syntax. This is how I'm declaring and initializing the arrays.

char * words[] = { "THESE", "ARE", "SOME", "WORDS" };

I've tried doing this...

free(words);

And this...

for(i = 0; i < 4; i++) {
    free(words[i]);
}

But the first one causes some sort of invalid pointer error with glibc, and the second one causes a segmentation fault.

So what's the right way to free this memory?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 84

Answers (1)

Casper Beyer
Casper Beyer

Reputation: 2301

If you did not allocate it (e.g malloc, calloc) then you shouldn't be deallocating it either (e.g free).

Documentation will in general be very clear and explicit if you need to free a pointer returned from a function, for example strdup would be such a case.

Upvotes: 3

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