From 1722eb83b4adf879426908bc6006f869ca224564 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jay Satiro Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2020 02:59:40 -0500 Subject: [PATCH] curl_getenv.3: Fix the memory handling description - Tell the user to call curl_free() to free the pointer returned by curl_getenv(). Prior to this change the user was directed to call free(), but that would not work in cases where the library and application use separate C runtimes and therefore have separate heap memory management. Closes https://github.com/curl/curl/pull/5016 --- docs/libcurl/curl_getenv.3 | 8 ++++---- 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) diff --git a/docs/libcurl/curl_getenv.3 b/docs/libcurl/curl_getenv.3 index c6bee98db..b6cc623ba 100644 --- a/docs/libcurl/curl_getenv.3 +++ b/docs/libcurl/curl_getenv.3 @@ -31,15 +31,15 @@ curl_getenv - return value for environment name curl_getenv() is a portable wrapper for the getenv() function, meant to emulate its behaviour and provide an identical interface for all operating systems libcurl builds on (including win32). + +You must \fIcurl_free(3)\fP the returned string when you're done with it. .SH AVAILABILITY This function will be removed from the public libcurl API in a near future. It will instead be made "available" by source code access only, and then as curlx_getenv(). .SH RETURN VALUE -If successful, curl_getenv() returns a pointer to the value of the specified -environment. The memory it refers to is malloc()ed so the application must -free() this when the data is no longer needed. When \fIcurl_getenv(3)\fP fails -to find the specified name, it returns a null pointer. +A pointer to a zero terminated string or NULL if it failed to find the +specified name. .SH NOTE Under unix operating systems, there isn't any point in returning an allocated memory, although other systems won't work properly if this isn't done. The