Question

For some reason valgrind keeps throwing the following error:

==6263== Invalid read of size 4
==6263==    at 0x40151B9: (within /lib/ld-2.7.so)
==6263==    by 0x4005C29: (within /lib/ld-2.7.so)
==6263==    by 0x4007A47: (within /lib/ld-2.7.so)
==6263==    by 0x40114F3: (within /lib/ld-2.7.so)
==6263==    by 0x400D585: (within /lib/ld-2.7.so)
==6263==    by 0x4010F0D: (within /lib/ld-2.7.so)
==6263==    by 0x4141391: (within /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc-2.7.so)
==6263==    by 0x400D585: (within /lib/ld-2.7.so)
==6263==    by 0x4141554: __libc_dlopen_mode (in /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc-2.7.so)
==6263==    by 0x411B286: __nss_lookup_function (in /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc-2.7.so)
==6263==    by 0x411B39F: (within /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc-2.7.so)
==6263==    by 0x411CFC5: __nss_hosts_lookup (in /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc-2.7.so)
==6263==  Address 0x4183d24 is 36 bytes inside a block of size 37 alloc'd
==6263==    at 0x4022AB8: malloc (vg_replace_malloc.c:207)

Here is the way I’m doing it. Any reasons why this is happening? Thanks

#include <arpa/inet.h>
#include <netdb.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

char *IPtoHostname(const char *ipaddress)
{ 
    struct hostent *host;
    unsigned int ip = 0;
    ip = inet_addr (ipaddress);
    host = gethostbyaddr ((char *) &ip, sizeof (unsigned int), AF_INET);
    if (host == NULL) return NULL;
    return strdup(host->h_name);
}

int main () {
   const char *ip = "65.55.4.170";
   char *a =  NULL;
   a = IPtoHostname(ip);
   printf ("%s\n", a); 
   free (a);

   return 0;
}

Update: It happens when I run it under Linux hardy 2.6.24-16-generic It does not happen under Ubuntu 9.10

Answer 1

Your code is OK (although you should really be using in_addr_t instead of unsigned int for the variable ip in IPtoHostname()).

The Valgrind report is a well-known issue – either a false positive or a bug in glibc.