Question

void* myfunction() { 
char *p; 
    *p = 0; 
    return (void*) &p; 
}

I know the problem is in the return statement, but it’s confusing. Any hints?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You have a problem before the return statement in the *p = 0;. You haven’t initialized p, so this writes to whatever random location that unitialized pointer happens to hold. That gives undefined behavior, so nothing afterwards has any meaningful interpretation at all.

Assuming you fixed that, then yes, the return statement would be a problem as well — you’d be returning a pointer to data that’s destroyed before the return completes, so any attempt at using the pointer you returned would cause undefined behavior again.