There is more than one way to define “memory leak”. In particular, there are two primary definitions of “memory leak” that are in common usage among programmers. The first commonly used definition of “memory leak” is, “Memory was allocated and was not subsequently freed before the program terminated.” However, many programmers (rightly) argue that certain … Read more
No; you shouldn’t cast the result, since: It is unnecessary, as void * is automatically and safely promoted to any other pointer type in this case. It adds clutter to the code, casts are not very easy to read (especially if the pointer type is long). It makes you repeat yourself, which is generally bad. … Read more
As @stefan said using fopen() with “w” mode will do the job for you. When you open a file with “w” flag it creates an empty file for writing. If a file with the same name already exists its contents are erased and the file is treated as an empty new file. If the file … Read more
If you’re on using a glibc, then: #define _GNU_SOURCE #include <errno.h> extern char *program_invocation_name; extern char *program_invocation_short_name; See program_invocation_name(3) Under most Unices, __progname is also defined by the libc. The sole portable way is to use argv[0]
Taking advantage of short-circuiting in boolean expressions: int max(int a, int b, int c) { int m = a; (m < b) && (m = b); //these are not conditional statements. (m < c) && (m = c); //these are just boolean expressions. return m; } Explanation: In boolean AND operation such as x && … Read more
Why was it is not an easy question. Maybe it’s time to ask the standard committee why were they as crazy as to standardize (the now removed) gets() function as well? Sometimes, the standard is simply brain-dead, whether we want it or not. The first C was not today’s C. It was not “designed” to … Read more
if ( printf(“Hello”) == 0 ) printf (“Hello”); else printf (“World”); 🙂
I believe __STDC_IEC_559__ relies on some library features and can’t be defined solely by the compiler. See this post for some information. This is not uncommon for C — the compiler and the C library must sometimes cooperate in order to implement the entire standard. What you’re asking depends on the compiler. I think you … Read more
TLDR: you are currently relying on unspecified behaviour of signal(2); use sigaction (carefully) instead. Firstly, SIGCHLD is strange. From the manual page for sigaction; POSIX.1-1990 disallowed setting the action for SIGCHLD to SIG_IGN. POSIX.1-2001 allows this possibility, so that ignoring SIGCHLD can be used to prevent the creation of zombies (see wait(2)). Nevertheless, the historical … Read more
While Helgrind can detect locking order violations, for most programs DRD needs less memory to perform its analysis. Also, DRD has support for detached threads. There are more subtle differences too – compare the respective manuals if you want to know more. See also http://valgrind.org/docs/manual/hg-manual.html and http://valgrind.org/docs/manual/drd-manual.html.