Hi All Thanks very much for your very valid inputs. I did as suggested and instead of checking to see if the pointer returned -ve (this was legacy code not mine :-)), I changed it to check for null and continued to use this pointer and all worked fine so far. Thanks much for the advice. With Regards Vardhan -----Original Message----- From: gcc-help-owner@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:gcc-help-owner@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Austin, Alex Sent: Friday, October 10, 2008 2:58 PM To: 'Andrew Bell'; Vardhan, Sundara (GE Infra, Energy) Cc: gcc-help@xxxxxxxxxxx Subject: RE: Help with malloc In other words, it just so happens that the address space used when you alloc that much is >2GB, so the first bit is set which appears as a negative number if you cast it to a signed int. It is a valid pointer, so just use it. -----Original Message----- From: gcc-help-owner@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:gcc-help-owner@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Andrew Bell Sent: Friday, October 10, 2008 1:34 PM To: Vardhan, Sundara (GE Infra, Energy) Cc: gcc-help@xxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: Help with malloc On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 1:30 PM, Vardhan, Sundara (GE Infra, Energy) <sundara.vardhan@xxxxxx> wrote: > Hi All > > Desperate: Do not know if this is the right forum for this > question. Using gcc 4.1.1 on Red Hat Linux, I keep getting negative > pointer value when I try to allocate more than 128000 bytest using > malloc(). Works fine if the value is less than 128000. Any ideas why > this happens. I would very much appreciate your help and input. RETURN VALUE For calloc() and malloc(), the value returned is a pointer to the allocated memory, which is suitably aligned for any kind of variable, or NULL if the request fails. -- Andrew Bell andrew.bell.ia@xxxxxxxxx
