I came to know about memory leak using top. What I did was that I executed the code and and then checked the program memory usage using top command. top showed me that as the program kept on executing and reading more files, the memory usage would increase with time. Ultimately, a time came where the Linux Kernel killed the process itself because it was about to crash the system.

In fact after tweaking the code, the modified function which I have written later, I could see that the memory usage remains constant in top. Hence, this made me believe that it was the

Code:

void read_text_file ( FILE *file_pointer , char ** words_to_be_read , unsigned long int *number_of_words )

function that was causing the memory leak.

Looking at the fundamental concept, what I was doing was getting a chunk of memory in the main() main. Then passing an address of that allocated location as a parameter in a function so that I don't have to use malloc() inside a function. But within in the getline() function I was using the same allocated variable, which getline() function was again allocating on its own again. This resulted in memory leak, because that was not being freed (please look at my earlier

Code:

void read_text_file ( FILE *file_pointer , char ** words_to_be_read , unsigned long int *number_of_words )

function code). Moreover, I cannot use free to free up that variable as I have to return back to main() to do further computations. Therefore, I introduced a new variable *line initialized with NULL and then after reading a line from the file using in that and before returning, free'd that variable in the

Code:

void read_text_file ( FILE *file_pointer , char ** words_to_be_read , unsigned long int *number_of_words )

function (which is in my new code). I have already executed the program and it has given me the results without causing any further troubles. But since I am still learning C, I am not sure whether the standard of my code is good enough.