Question

I’m trying to learn C and I’m currently trying to write a basic stack data structure, but I can’t seem to get basic malloc/free right.

Here’s the code I’ve been using (I’m just posting a small part here to illustrate a specific problem, not the total code, but the error message was generated just by running this example code in valgrind)

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

typedef struct Entry {
    struct Entry *previous;
    int value;
} Entry;

void destroyEntry(Entry entry);

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    Entry* apple;
    apple = malloc(sizeof(Entry));
    destroyEntry(*(apple));
    return 0;
}

void destroyEntry(Entry entry)
{
    Entry *entry_ptr = &entry;
    free(entry_ptr);
    return;
}

When I run it through valgrind with --leak-check=full --track-origins=yes, I get the following error:

==20674== Invalid free() / delete / delete[] / realloc()
==20674==    at 0x4028E58: free (vg_replace_malloc.c:427)
==20674==    by 0x80485B2: destroyEntry (testing.c:53)
==20674==    by 0x8048477: main (testing.c:26)
==20674==  Address 0xbecc0070 is on thread 1's stack

I think this error means that the destroyEntry function is not allowed to modify memory allocated explicitly in main. Is that right? Why can’t I just free the memory I allocated in main in another function? (and is this behavior somehow specific to main?)

Answer 1

Whenever you pass a parameter to a function, a copy is made, and the function works on that copy. So in your case, you are trying to free a copy of the original object, which doesn’t make any sense.

You should modify your function to take a pointer, and then you can have it call free directly on that pointer.