free

 

C

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Atomic operations (C11)

 

Dynamic memory management

malloc

calloc

realloc

free

aligned_alloc (C11)

 

Defined in header <stdlib.h>
void free( void* ptr );

Deallocates the space previously allocated by malloc(), calloc() or realloc(). If ptr is null-pointer, the function does nothing.

The behavior is undefined if ptr does not match a pointer returned earlier by malloc(), calloc(), realloc(), or aligned_alloc(). Also, the behavior is undefined if the memory area referred to by ptr has already been deallocated, that is, free() or realloc() has already been called with ptr as the argument and no calls to malloc(), calloc() or realloc() resulted in a pointer equal to ptr afterwards.

free is thread-safe: it behaves as though only accessing the memory locations visible through its argument, and not any static storage. A call to free that deallocates a region of memory synchronizes-with a call to any subsequent allocation function that allocates the same or a part of the same region of memory. This synchronization occurs after any access to the memory by the deallocating function and before any access to the memory by the allocation function.

(since C11)

Parameters

ptr

-

pointer to the memory to deallocate

Return value

(none)

Example

Run this code

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
 
int main(void) 
{
    /* Allocate an array with 100 integers. */
    int *pa = malloc(100*sizeof(int));
    if (pa == NULL) {        /* check that memory allocation occurred */
       printf("malloc() failed in file %s at line # %d", __FILE__,__LINE__);
       printf("***  PROGRAM TERMINATED  ***");
       exit(1);
    }
    printf("starting address of pa:   %p\n", (void*)pa);
 
    /* Deallocate array pa. */
    free(pa), pa = NULL;
 
    /* Allocate an array with 100 doubles. */
    double *pb = malloc(100*sizeof(double));
    if (pb == NULL) {        /* check that memory allocation occurred */
       printf("malloc() failed in file %s at line # %d", __FILE__,__LINE__);  
       printf("***  PROGRAM TERMINATED  ***");
       exit(1);
    }
 
    /* Array pb may have the same starting address that array pa had. */
    printf("starting address of pb:   %p\n", (void*)pb);
 
    free(pb);
    return 0;
}

Possible output:

starting address of pa:   0x2113010
starting address of pb:   0x2113010

See also

C++ documentation for free