Re: [Help-bash] deallocation of brace expanded variable

[Chet Ramey]

On 9/11/14, 10:49 AM, Sebastian Eiser wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> I'm not sure if this is intended behaviour or not, but it seems that a
> brace expanded variable is not deallocated:
> 
> for i in {1..10000000}; do echo -n; done

Here's what I wrote one of the other times this came up:

==========
That's not a memory leak.  Malloc implementations need not release
memory back to the kernel; the bash malloc (and others) do so only
under limited circumstances.  Memory obtained from the kernel using
mmap or sbrk and kept in a cache by a malloc implementation doesn't
constitute a leak.  A leak is memory for which there is no longer a
handle, by the application or by malloc itself.
==========

malloc() is basically a cache between the application and the kernel.
It gets to decide when and how to give memory back to the kernel.

Chet
-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    address@hidden    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/