Freeing bss Data

The bss section contains uninitialized data. That is, variables in this section have a name and a size but they do not have a value. Specifically, these variables are your program’s uninitialized static and global variables. Because they exist in a data section, your program cannot free their memory.

The following program tries to free a variable in this section:

static int bss_var;

int main (int argc, char *argv[])

{

void *addr = (void *) (&bss_var);

/* Error: address in bss section */

free(addr);

return 0;

}