COHERENT manpages
This page displays the COHERENT manpage for alloca() [Dynamically allocate space on the stack].
List of available manpages
Index
alloca() -- General Function (libc) Dynamically allocate space on the stack alloca(memory) int memory; The function alloca() allocates memory number of bytes dynamically on the stack. The allocated memory disappears automatically as soon as the program exits from the function within which the memory was allocated. For example, consider the function: foo(some_string) char *some_string; { char *cp; . . . cp = alloca(strlen(some_string) + 1); strcpy(cp, some_string); . . . } Here, the call to alloca() allocates enough space upon the stack for some_string plus the terminating NUL character. When function foo() returns, the allocated memory vanishes. This routine is popular in Berkeley and GNU circles because it is much faster than malloc(), and the programmer does not need to call free() to de-allocate the memory. See Also calloc(), libc, malloc(), realloc()