NOTE: Software literature names this concept as premature free or Reading/writing freed memory using a pointer.
WDB tracks the dangling pointers and dangling blocks using a modified version of Garbage collection. The enabler for doing this is by retaining all the freed blocks internally within RTC without actually freeing it as long as possible. It displays all the potential pointers to the freed dangling blocks, in the application data space.
The pointers are potential because the pointers need not be actual pointers and could be a datum value and hence there are chances of false positives in the dangling report.
NOTE: WDB tries to help as much as possible to detect if these pointers are of type datum or real pointers. In a
WDB turns on these checks, only when you specify set
14.10.8.6 Detect
HP WDB detects all the attempts of a program to write to the freed dangling blocks using dangling pointers. We detect such
14.10.8.7 Specify the amount of guard bytes for every block of allocated memory
HP WDB enables you to programmatically control the size of guard bytes for every block of the allocated memory. You can use these guard bytes to spot very rare and
HP WDB 5.6 and later versions provide consistency in format for the batch mode options and the interactive mode commands.
The following table lists the memory debugging commands available in batch and interactive mode:
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