Question

What is the best way to zero out new memory after calling realloc while keeping the initially allocated memory intact?

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

size_t COLORCOUNT = 4;

typedef struct rgb_t {
    int r;
    int g;
    int b;
} rgb_t;

rgb_t** colors;

void addColor(size_t i, int r, int g, int b) {
    rgb_t* color;
    if (i >= COLORCOUNT) {
        // new memory wont be NULL
        colors = realloc(colors, sizeof(rgb_t*) * i);
       //something messy like this...
        //memset(colors[COLORCOUNT-1],0 ,sizeof(rgb_t*) * (i - COLORCOUNT - 1));

         // ...or just do this (EDIT)
        for (j=COLORCOUNT; j<i; j++) {
            colors[j] = NULL;
        }

        COLORCOUNT = i;
    }

    color = malloc(sizeof(rgb_t));
    color->r = r;
    color->g = g;
    color->b = b;

    colors[i] = color;
}

void freeColors() {
    size_t i;
    for (i=0; i<COLORCOUNT; i++) {
        printf("%x\n", colors[i]);
        // can't do this if memory isn't NULL
       // if (colors[i])
         //   free(colors[i]);

    }
}


int main() {
    colors = malloc(sizeof(rgb_t*) * COLORCOUNT);
    memset(colors,0,sizeof(rgb_t*) * COLORCOUNT);
    addColor(0, 255, 0, 0);
    addColor(3, 255, 255, 0);
    addColor(7, 0, 255, 0);


    freeColors();
    getchar();
}

Answer 1

There is probably no need to do the memset: you may not be using colors[k] before setting it with something valid later. For example, your code sets colors[i] to a newly allocated color pointer, so you didn’t need to set colors[i] to NULL.

But, even if you wanted to “zero it out so everything is nice”, or really need the new pointers to be NULL: the C standard doesn’t guarantee that all-bits-zero is the null pointer constant (i.e., NULL), so memset() isn’t the right solution anyway.

The only portable thing you can do is to set each pointer to NULL in a loop:

size_t k;
for (k=COLORCOUNT; k < i+1; ++k) /* see below for why i+1 */
    colors[k] = NULL;

Your primary problem is that your realloc() call is wrong. realloc() returns a pointer to the resized memory, it doesn’t (necessarily) resize it in-place.

So, you should do:

/* i+1 because you later assign to colors[i] */
rgb_t **tmp = realloc(colors, (i+1) * sizeof *tmp);
if (tmp != NULL) {
    /* realloc succeeded, can't use colors anymore */
    colors = tmp;
} else {
    /* realloc failed, colors is still valid */
}

If you really want to know what the memset() call should be, you need to set to zero the memory starting at colors+COLORCOUNT, and set i+1-COLORCOUNT members to zero:

memset(colors+COLORCOUNT, 0, (i+1-COLORCOUNT) * sizeof *colors);

But as I said above, all bytes zero is not guaranteed to be a NULL pointer, so your memset() is useless anyway. You have to use a loop if you want NULL pointers.