strlen on a NULL

Steve Greenland steve.greenland@aspentech.com
Wed May 13 15:43:00 GMT 1998


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Carsten.Roedel@rt.bosch.de [ mailto:Carsten.Roedel@rt.bosch.de ]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 1998 1:14 AM
>
> By the way, in 'free' it's getting worse,
> because you must also check not for pointing to a 'Zero', 
> this causes a crash. 

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this phrase, but 
free(NULL) *is* defined: it's a no-op. If your implementation
crashes or otherwise misbehaves when you make the call "free(NULL)"
(or an equivalent), then the implementation is broken (assuming it
claims to be ISO C compliant, of course). 

Note that the sequence 

char *a = malloc(5);
free(a);
free(a);

*is* undefined; <a> is NOT set to NULL by the first call to free (how
could
it be?) but it does make the value of a invalid; the second call to free
attempts to free an invalid pointer...

Steve
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