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I'm telneting into a school network and I know gcc and cc are available. Both of them are giving me these errors.
Changing "status" to type char * eliminated the second error but I have a question regarding that, when and how do I determine if I want to use a char* or just a char?
Does anyone else have any idea why I would be getting an error from the malloc line?
I realize the difference between a char and a char*, I guess I just dont see when each one applies. A lot of the time in my notes from various classes, the prof's always seem to use char*'s as parameters and then randomly pick and choose between char's and char*s whenever declaring variables. But whatever, thanks for your help.
I also tried writing and compiling your code from the above reply and still recieved the same error message, so it must be the compiler at school.
You'll get the error with gcc if you don't #include <stdlib.h>. The reason is because without the malloc() prototype the return type defaults to int instead of void * like it's supposed to be. If you #include <stdlib.h> the error/warning should go away.
char and char * are definitely very much different. It would be a very lengthy topic for me to get into, but a google search on pointers in C should reveal a lot.
It's usually a good idea to cast the return value of malloc to whatever pointer you're trying to make. A void *, which malloc returns, can't be dereferenced by itself and needs to be cast before dereferencing. I'd recommend changing your code to read:
If you code in C, it's not a good idea to cast the return value of malloc(), it's actually
a bad idea because will hide any failure to include the header where malloc() is declared,
namely stdlib.h.
In C++, on the other hand, you must cast what malloc() returns because C++ won't perform
that conversion automatically as C will. But if you use C++, you should always use new and
delete when allocating memory dynamically.
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