how to free memory when you forget to free up space in c after using malloc? [duplicate]

Question

i just wrote a code

int main(void){
    int* B=malloc(sizeof(int));
    printf("%p",B);
}

to check if it allocates different memory every time i run it, but i forgot to add free(); in this, so how can i free that memory now, which has been used by this code to allocate it to the variable B?

Answer 1

Generally speaking memory is freed when process terminates. It is not a problem with your example code, but not freeing memory instantly when you don't need it anymore is not a good habit. If you are creating stuff for system that has resources close to none, every used byte at runtime counts. If you have a long running process, not freeing memory will show up as a memory leak.