Notes for malloc

Once you've written a file malloc.c containing the malloc, free, calloc, and realloc functions, you can test it in a couple of ways:

• Compile with another program. For example,

  gcc malloc.c churn.c -o churn

  will compile the churn program so that it uses the malloc functions in malloc.c
• Build a shared object and preload it for all executables. You build the shared object with

  gcc -shared -fPIC malloc.c -o malloc.so

  and then tell the system to use your malloc with

  export LD_PRELOAD=./malloc.so

  (or better, give the full path to malloc.so so things work outside of your malloc directory).
  After your define LD_PRELOAD, every executable (for example, ls) is affected. You can

  export LD_PRELOAD=

  to turn it off.