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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-07T13:39:21+00:00

When I try to use realloc to allocate memory for a pointer which has

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When I try to use realloc to allocate memory for a pointer which has been free‘d, I get a segmentation fault. Although I don’t face this issue if I use malloc instead.

As per my understanding after the variable has been free‘d it is equivalent to a NULL pointer, then why is this unexpected behavior? Am I missing something?

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  1. Editorial Team

    As per my understanding after the variable has been free’d it is equivalent to a NULL pointer.

    A NULL pointer is a pointer whose value is NULL; standard functions like realloc know how to interpret this value.

    A pointer to some memory that has been freed is now an invalid pointer; its value doesn’t change. realloc doesn’t know that it’s invalid, and will try and access it, leading to the seg-fault.

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