Memory leak detection in linux applications

Please let me know, how to detect if the application has memory leak in linux platform. Which command/tool and what counters to track ?

Run the program (compiled with debug symbols) through valgrind. It will report any questionable memory-related actions, including leaks.

Thanks for you suggestion. Before doing that, is there any reliable linux utility, by which i can confirm if there application really leaks memory ?

Valgrind is the solution to that too. Valgrind is God for linux development.

Lindley: agreed, it often even helps me find the cause of segfaults faster than gdb...

htonivi: You may have to compile your code with debug symbols using -g to get backtraces (more detail). This might not be required though (it is when using gdb).

Then:

Code:

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gcc -g -o yourprog yourprog.c
valgrind --tool=memcheck --leak-check=full ./yourprog

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Note that your code will run way slower under Valgrind, of course, since it's doing a lot of run-time checking. If some of the backtraces are "optimized out" as you see with gdb, compile without optimizations (-O0).