leaks(1) BSD General Commands Manual leaks(1)
NAME
leaks -- Search a process's memory for unreferenced malloc buffers
SYNOPSIS
leaks pid | partial-executable-name [-nocontext] [-nostacks] [-exclude symbol] [-trace address]
DESCRIPTION
leaks identifies leaked memory -- memory that the application has allocated, but has been lost and cannot be freed. Specifically, leaks
examines a specified process's memory for values that may be pointers to malloc-allocated buffers. Any buffer reachable from a pointer in
writable global memory (e.g., __DATA segments), a register, or on the stack is assumed to be memory in use. Any buffer reachable from a
pointer in a reachable malloc-allocated buffer is also assumed to be in use. The buffers which are not reachable are leaks; the buffers
could never be freed because no pointer exists in memory to the buffer, and thus free() could never be called for these buffers. Such buf-
fers waste memory; removing them can reduce swapping and memory usage. Leaks are particularly dangerous for long-running programs, for even-
tually the leaks could fill memory and cause the application to crash.
leaks requires one parameter -- either the process ID or executable name of the process to examine. It also takes several arguments for mod-
ifying its behavior.
For each leaked buffer that is found, leaks prints the address of the leaked memory and its size. If leaks can determine that the object is
an instance of an Objective-C, CoreFoundation, or C++ class, or a CFType, it also specifies the name and type of the class, and the binary
image that implements the class. It then prints a string or hexadecimal representation of the contents of the memory, unless the -nocontext
option was specified.
If the MallocStackLogging environment variable was set when the application was launched, leaks also prints a stack trace describing where
the buffer was allocated.
OPTIONS
-nocontext Do not print the string or hex representation of leaked memory. Although that information can be useful for recognizing the
contents of the buffer and understanding why it might be leaked, it can also provide overwhelming detail, and could expose
confidential information from your process if you, for example, file bug reports with that output included.
-nostacks Do not print backtraces of leaked blocks even if the target process has the MallocStackLogging environment variable set.
-exclude symbol
Exclude leaked blocks whose backtraces include the specified symbol. This option can be repeated for multiple symbols. This
allows ignoring leaks that, for example, are allocated in libraries for which you do not have source code.
-trace address
Print chains of references from process 'roots' (e.g., global data, registers, or locations on stacks) to the given block.
This is useful for determining what is holding onto a buffer such that it has not been freed.
ENVIRONMENT
The leaks command may detect more leaks if the target process is run with the MallocScribble environment variable. If this variable is set
then when malloc blocks are deallocated they are filled with 0x55 bytes, thus overwriting any "stale" data such as pointers remaining in
those blocks. This reduces the number of false pointers remaining in the process memory.
EXIT STATUS
The leaks command exits with one of the following values:
0 No leaks were detected.
1 One or more leaks were detected.
>1 An error occurred.
SEE ALSO
malloc(3), heap(1), malloc_history(1), stringdups(1), vmmap(1), DevToolsSecurity(1)
The Xcode developer tools also include Instruments, a graphical application that can give information similar to that provided by leaks. The
Allocations instrument graphically displays dynamic, real-time information about the object and memory use in an application, including back-
traces of where the allocations occurred. The Leaks instrument performs memory leak analysis.
BSD
Mar. 16, 2013 BSD