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Re: [PATCH] parse_object: check if buffer is non-NULL before freeing it

From
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date
Aug 28, 2006, 04:33 UTC
Message-ID
<Pine.LNX.4.64.0608272131020.27779@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To
<7vsljhtrsv.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
On Sun, 27 Aug 2006, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> 
> Eh, free(NULL) should work just fine.  It is "other places" that
> is misguided and needs to be fixed.
Well, some very old libraries will SIGSEGV on free(NULL).

Admittedly those libraries are either very old or _very_ broken, but if you want to be strictly portable, you should not ever pass NULL to free(), unless you actually got it from a malloc(0) (and even then, it might be a really broken libc that just ran out of memory).

I actually suspect we should wrap all free() calls as "xfree()", which may also help us some day if we want to do any memory usage statistics.

		Linus
Previous: Junio C HamanoNext: Junio C Hamano
Message 3 of 4 in “parse_object: check if buffer is non-NULL before freeing it”
  1. parse_object: check if buffer is non-NULL before freeing itJonas Fonseca, Aug 28, 2006
  2. Junio C HamanoAug 28, 2006
  3. Linus TorvaldsAug 28, 2006
  4. Junio C HamanoAug 28, 2006

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