Question

So I’m learning pointers and having a difficult time identifying the memory leak here. I confess I have never used malloc() before and am new to pointer arithmetic. Thanks in advance.

 /*filename: p3.c */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main()
{
        char *buffer;
        char *p;
        int n;

        /* allocate 10 bytes */
        buffer = (char *) malloc(10);

        p = buffer;
        for (n=0; n<=10; n++)
                *p++ = '*';

        p = buffer;
        for (n=0; n <=10; n++)
                printf("%c ", *p++);

        return 0;
}

Answer 1

You simply need to free your buffer by using the free() function, when you don’t need the buffer anymore:

    /* ... */
    free( buffer );
    return 0;
}

Simply remember to balance each call to malloc with a call to free, when the memory is not used anymore.

The operations on your p variable won’t affect buffer. They are two pointers pointing to the same area (at start), but they’re still two distinct variables. So incrementing p won’t increment buffer.
So nothing wrong with the pointer operations on p, except the fact you are writing out of bounds, as stated by Daniel Fisher in the comments of your question.

Also note that you should also always check for NULL, after the malloc call, as malloc may fail. It’s pretty rare nowadays, but if it fails, your program will probably crash, as you will then dereference a NULL pointer:

buffer = malloc( 10 );

if( buffer == NULL )
{
    /* Error management - Do not use buffer */
}

The cast to char * is not needed on malloc, unless you are dealing with C++. In C, it’s valid to assign a void pointer to another pointer type.