From: Linus Torvalds Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2006 04:33:16 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH] parse_object: check if buffer is non-NULL before freeing it Message-ID: 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