Question

I need your advice on this piece of code:
the table fields options[0], options[1] etc… doesn’t seem to be freed correctly.
Thanks for your answers

int main()
{
  ....
  char **options;
  options = generate_fields(user_input);
  for(i = 0; i < sizeof(options) / sizeof(options[0]); i++)  {
    free(options[i]);
    options[i] = NULL;
  }

  free(options);
}

char ** generate_fields(char *) 
{
   char ** options = malloc(256*sizeof(char *));
   ...
   return options;

}

Answer 1

The problem is this:

for(i = 0; i < sizeof(options) / sizeof(options[0]); i++)

options is a pointer type, not an array type, so sizeof(options) will always be the same (typically 4 bytes on a 32-bit machine or 8 bytes on a 64-bit machine), so sizeof(options)/sizeof(options[0]) will almost always be 1.

The key is to always free memory in the same manner as you malloc‘ed it. So, if you malloc a 2-dimensional array and then malloc a series of 1-dimensional arrays, you need to do the reverse when freeing it:

char ** generate_fields(char *) 
{
   char ** options = malloc(256*sizeof(char *));
   for(int i = 0; i < 256; i++)
       options[i] = malloc(some_size);
   return options;
}

void free_fields(char ** options)
{
    for(int i = 0; i < 256; i++)
        free(options[i]);
    free(options);
}

Note that if the size (256 in this case) is not a constant, you need to keep track of it yourself, since otherwise you have no way of knowing how many times to loop when freeing.