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This is more of a best practices
question.
I'm working with environment variables. In
UNIX environment variables are made available directly via the
extern char **environ
construct. Which is an array of pointers to
strings, each string containing the key value pairs of environment variables
inherited from the parent process.
What I'm doing is taking those environment
variables and modifying some and adding a few more. This means I
need to create a new char * array. Since I'm adding some new key
value pairs I need to grow the array, the documentation I have is pretty
explicit about you not been able to realloc the existing array of char*s.
So I create a new one that has enough space to hold pointers to all of the
existing strings of key value pairs, plus the number of additional pointers as
required. I then simply assign this new array to the environ
variable.
My problem is (and I may be a little anal) is that
this is a memory leak. I'm losing the space that is occupied by the
original char * array. Which on a 32 bit machine is bytes of ram per
entry. With a common number of entries been somewhere in the neighbourhood
of 70. So I lose 280 bytes. Not a big deal. I worry about
these sorts of things because I'm looking to generalize my functions for dealing
with key value pairs of variables into a library, which means that with multiple
uses the memory leak losses could pile up. I can't conceive of a time when
somebody would use these functions enough for this to be a problem, however just
because I can't doesn't mean somebody won't (maybe they are writing a new shell
or CGI processor).
My problem is you can't free the original environ
char * array, because it wasn't allocated by malloc, the same reason why I can't
realloc it in place. I can code around this and be able to free all
subsequent arrays I create but damnit, the solution lacks elegance, and I hate
that.
Is there anything I can do about
this?
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