How can I free all allocated memory at once?
arrays, c, memory, memory-management, pointers
Solution
Not with the standard malloc() allocator - you need to investigate the use of memory pools. These work by allocating a big block of memory up-front, allocating from it and freeing back to it as you request via their own allocation functions, and then freeing the whole lot with a special "deallocate all" function.
I must say I've always found these things a bit ugly - it really isn't that hard to write code that doesn't leak. The only reason I can see for using them is to mitigate heap fragmentation, if that is a real problem for you.
Problem
Here is what I am working with: ``` char* qdat[][NUMTBLCOLS]; char** tdat[]; char* ptr_web_data; // Loop thru each table row of the query result set for(row_index = 0; row_index < number_rows; row_index++) { // Loop thru each column of the query result set and extract the data for(col_index = 0; col_index < number_cols; col_index++) { ptr_web_data = (char*) malloc((strlen(Data) + 1) * sizeof(char)); memcpy (ptr_web_data, column_text, strlen(column_text) + 1); qdat[row_index][web_data_index] = ptr_web_data; } } tdat[row_index] = qdat[col_index]; ``` After the data is used, the memory allocated is released one at a time using free(). ``` for(row_index = 0; row_index < number_rows; row_index++) { // Loop thru all columns used for(col_index = 0; col_index < SARWEBTBLCOLS; col_index++) { // Free memory block pointed to by results set array free(tdat[row_index][col_index]); } } ``` Is there a way to release all the allocated memory at once, for this array? Thank You.