16.9. Dynamic Memory Management

Many programs, including those that work with dynamic data structures for example, depend on the ability to allocate and release blocks of memory at runtime. C programs can do that by means of the four dynamic memory management functions declared in the header stdlib.h, which are listed in Table 16-22. The use of these functions is described in detail in Chapter 12.

Table 16-22. Dynamic memory management functions

Purpose	Function
Allocate a block of memory	malloc( )
Allocate a memory block and fill it with null bytes	calloc( )
Resize an allocated memory block	realloc( )
Release a memory block	free( )