G'Day Peter,
 
-=> Quoting Peter Collis to Frank Adam <=-

 PC> should work just fine just don't forget to add the 'return' to the end
 PC> of your foo function.
i don't think the compiler will let me forget :)
 
 FA> says "what s?" of course.
 PC> have a pointer ready to accept the return pointer value.
thanks, i've had a complete mental shutdown on this, as soon as i saw 
the first reply it clicked that it's the same memory location.
 
 
 FA> I also believe that in a multitask environment, that would be
 FA> fatal if another program got a slice between free() and return,

 PC> not sure if i understand what you mean here?.
Well i imagined a scenario, where Prog1 is running in conjunction 
with Prog2, Prog1 goes off and does it's thing in foo() and just as it 
executed the free(str) statement, OS steps in and gives Prog2 a slice
Prog2 happens to be looking for memory and comes across a "free" block
where Prog1's str lives, and happily populates it... 
When Prog1 gets it's slice back it goes and returns ptr which is no 
longer the same animal, promptly hanging the machine or do something weird.
Then i'd go and bash ctrl+alt+delete yelling how i hate intermittent bugs,
and probably spend ages finding it, because it's likely to work just fine
in the debugger.


  L8r Frank (fadam{at}ozemail.com.au).
  
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