3.3 Checking of Function Arguments

One potential problem with the library and its multitude of checks and diagnoses is that they only get performed when a dmalloc function is called. One solution this is to include `dmalloc.h' and compile your source code with the DMALLOC_FUNC_CHECK flag defined and enable the check-funcs token. See section Description of the Debugging Tokens.

cc -DDMALLOC -DDMALLOC_FUNC_CHECK file.c

NOTE: Once you have compiled your source with DMALLOC_FUNC_CHECK enabled, you will have to recompile with it off to disconnect the library. See section How to Disable the library.

WARNING: You should be sure to have `dmalloc.h' included at the end of your include file list because dmalloc uses macros and may try to change declarations of the checked functions if they come after it.

When this is defined dmalloc will override a number of functions and will insert a routine which knows how to check its own arguments and then call the real function. Dmalloc can check such functions as bcopy, index, strcat, and strcasecmp. For the full list see the end of `dmalloc.h'.

When you call strlen, for instance, dmalloc will make sure the string argument's fence-post areas have not been overwritten, its file and line number locations are good, etc. With bcopy, dmalloc will make sure that the destination string has enough space to store the number of bytes specified.

For all of the arguments checked, if the pointer is not in the heap then it is ignored since dmalloc does not know anything about it.

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