dangling pointer, reason for value change after free()?

Posted by Aman Jain on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Aman Jain
Published on 2010-04-01T07:19:23Z Indexed on 2010/04/01 7:23 UTC
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In the following code segment, after free(x), why does y becomes 0?

As per my understanding, the memory in the heap that was being pointed to by x, and is still being pointed by y, hasn't been allocated to someone else, so how can it change to 0?

And moreover, I don't think it is free(x) that changed it to 0.

Any comments?

#include <stdio.h>

int main ( int argc, char *argv[] )
{
        int *y = NULL;
        int *x = NULL;

        x = malloc(4);
        *x = 5;

        y = x;
        printf("[%d]\n", *y); //prints 5

        free(x);

        printf("[%d]\n", *y); //why doesn't print 5?, prints 0 instead

        return 0;
}

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