[Sussex] ncurses is conspiring against me.

[Captain Redbeard]

Hi again,

I think I've finally gotten my head around this dynamic 
memory allocation thing.  I've had to re-design the program 
from scratch having found some MAJOR design flaws but now 
I've gotten it up to the point that it contains most of the 
original data structures and sub-routines with Valgrind 
reporting zero errors and zero memory leaks.  However, 
having to that point and being ready to re-code the 
functionality, I've hit a new problem with the ncurses 
library that I would to get handled.

Take the following program, it does nothing at all except 
initialise and clean-up the ncurses library and exits:


#include <ncurses.h>

int main()
{
   initscr();
   endwin();
   return 0;
}


Not very exciting, not very useful.  However, despite its 
small size, it seems to contain a bug anyway!  The code was 
compiled with the command "gcc -Wall -o ncurses ncurses.c 
-lncurses" and compiled and ran fine, however when I checked 
the program with Valgrind I got the following output:


.
.
.
==22833== malloc/free: in use at exit: 82904 bytes in 162 
blocks.
==22833== malloc/free: 164 allocs, 2 frees, 82926 bytes 
allocated.
.
.
.


I've looked at whatever info I could find about ncurses, 
which wasn't a lot, but I don't see any other functions I 
need to call to avoid this memory leak from occurring.  My 
question really is is this leak (A) occurring because there 
is some routine I meant to call but haven't, (B) a bug in 
ncurses itself or (C) a fact of life that I don't need to 
worry about and can disregard?

I would like to be able to fix it so that Valgrind reports 
no unfreed memory as my current philosophy of keeping 
Valgrind happy has been very successful.  Also, I don't know 
how I would tell if any leaks reported by Valgrind are 
occurring because of ncurses calls or because of something 
I've done so this situation could potentially obscure some 
genuine bugs on my part.  Any ideas?



-- 
Captain Redbeard



======================================================
Insomnia - it's not a condition, it's a mentality.
Registered Linux user: 388693.
Registered Linux machines: 289172, 289173.
v2sw5+8C+JGhw5ln4/5pr6/7Ock1ma6/8l6+8Sw3+2e4t2b9Hen4+6
g5+3RHaIr9 Hackerkey.com
======================================================