Question

I’m using MiniZip to unzip a file in an iPhone project. Everything works fine but i get a leak in instruments in the MiniZip code on this line :

unzip.c
line 493

s=(unz_s*)ALLOC(sizeof(unz_s));
*s=us;
unzGoToFirstFile((unzFile)s);
return (unzFile)s;

I understand that the var allocated with ALLOC is returned and not deallocated. In objective-C i would simply do an autorelease, but how can i achieve that in plain C ?

Thanks,
Vincent.

Answer 1

The caller of that method is responsible for s and must free() it when it is no longer required to avoid the memory leak. This is the convention in C.

You would have to tie in a 3rd-party GC library, perhaps something like Hans Boehm’s GC for C/C++. However, my suggestion would be to just free the memory when it is appropriate on your own. You’ll run into less hassles that way.