Important Notice

The pages on this site contain documentation for very old MS-DOS software, purely for historical purposes. If you're looking for up-to-date documentation, particularly for programming, you should not rely on the information found here, as it will be woefully out of date.

 ◄Summary► ◄Example►                         ◄Up► ◄Contents► ◄Index► ◄Back►
─────Run-Time Library───────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 
     Functions in the free family deallocate a memory block. The
     <memblock> argument points to a memory block previously allocated
     through a call to calloc, malloc, or realloc. The number of bytes
     freed is the number of bytes specified when the block was
     allocated (or reallocated, in the case of realloc). After the
     call, the freed block is available for allocation.
 
     The <seg> argument specifies the based heap containing the memory
     block to be freed by the _bfree function.
 
     Attempting to free an invalid pointer may affect subsequent
     allocation and cause errors. Pointers not allocated with the
     appropriate call are invalid.
 
     The following restrictions apply to use of the free, _bfree,
     _ffree, and _nfree functions:
 
     Blocks allocated with             Should be freed with
 
     calloc, malloc, realloc           free
     _bcalloc, _bmalloc, _brealloc     _bfree
     _fcalloc, _fmalloc, _frealloc     _ffree
     _ncalloc, _nmalloc, _nrealloc     _nfree
 
     A NULL pointer argument is ignored.
 
     In large data models (compact-, large-, and huge-model programs),
     free maps to _ffree. In small data models (tiny-, small-, and
     medium-model programs), free maps to _nfree.
 
     The various free functions deallocate a memory block in the
     segments shown below:
 
     Function     Data Segment
 
     free         Depends on data model of program
     _bfree       Based heap specified by the <seg> value
     _ffree       Far heap (outside default data segment)
     _nfree       Near heap (inside default data segment)
 
     Return Value
 
     None.
                                    -♦-