Programming

This sounds very logical, But still the OS can know which part of Heap it has allocated to which process, then why cant the OS take care of freeing it when the process is getting killed. By the way,even if I call malloc to get memory, finally the OS does the allocation job, so it can still keep track of the meory allocated by the user. I tried reading memory leak stuff for quite sometime.. But couldnt find the answer why heap need to freed explicitly .. Please help me understand this

That doesn't make sense. A process shouldn't be required to free its heap memory or anything not specifically set as persistent when it dies.

Can you elaborate on how you use the size command to reach to your conclusions ? Especially what parameters do you pass to it. It doesn't seem to be usable for that purpose according to its manual page. Perhaps are you using a different "size" command ?

I am using the size command

sample output :
[root@cheuxsie82 cs]# size a.out
text data bss dec hex filename
1143 272 4 1419 58b a.out

I'm pretty sure the heap is freed when a process exits. In the end, it's just another segment. What malloc/free allows you to do is use, discard, and recycle bits of it frequently without having to keep track of all of it yourself. Its for convenience.

You mean to say that there wont be any problem at any point of time if there is memory leak in my code. right?

Code:

size a.out

is looking to a binary file on your disk that might have never run, or once, or multiple times and shouldn't be affected by it.
Does its output change while you run "a.out" several times ?

Of course, applications memory leaks disappear when the process dies.

No the output does not change at all. But many senior professionals in my office say that memleak is a serious issue. If you dont free it, it will cause fatal problems during execution. Can anyone tell me what memory leak would do to the process that caused it and other process running parallely?