.TH mem_analyze 1 "March 8, 1997" "Courts of Chaos Research" "mem_analyze manual"

.SH NAME
mem_analyze \- analyzes the output of programs linked with
libmem_test(3)
.SH SYNOPSIS
mem_analyze [-i] 
.I file
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B mem_analyze
is a perl script that is used to used to summarize the data produced by
libmem_test(3)

.B mem_analyze
will scan through a log file produced by a program linked with
libmem_test and keep track of the memory locations 
used and the amount of memory allocated at each. When
.B mem_analyze
is
done, the locations of any memory still allocated
will be listed, along with the name of the file and function that
last touched these locations.
.SH EXAMPLE
Here is an example of
.B mem_analyze
being run on a log file produced by the supplied example program linked with
libmem_test.

.RS
jbuchana$ mem_analyze MEM_TEST_FILE

128 bytes of memory left allocated at 134522336

134522336 was last touched by licalloc at line 32 of example_program.c

128 bytes of memory left allocated at 134521680

134521680 was last touched by limalloc at line 20 of example_program.c

16 bytes of memory left allocated at 134521608

134521608 was last touched by listrdup at line 28 of example_program.c

512 bytes of memory left allocated at 134521816

134521816 was last touched by lirealloc at line 25 of example_program.c

jbuchana$
.RE

Note that if there had been no (detected) memory leaks,
.B mem_analyze
would not have produced any output.
.SH OPTIONS
When a call to one of the allocation functions fails (returning a NULL
pointer), libmem_test writes an
error message to its log file, then passes the NULL pointer to the
users' program, which may do as it wills with it.

When
.B mem_analyze
encounters one of these errors, it normally exits, after printing the
error message as found in the log file.

By using the -i switch, you may override this behavior and force
.B mem_analyze
to continue. This is not recommended, but it is provided for those who
need this functionality.
.SH FILES
.I MEM_TEST_FILE
(the default name of the log file)
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.BR libmem_test (3)
.SH BUGS
.B mem_analyze
can be rather slow on large log files. I've had log files of over 10M
in size, these required some patience to analyze.

Both
.B mem_analyze
and
.B libmem_test
are fairly unsophisticated. There are functions which use and free memory
that aren't dealt with. Nonetheless, they have helped me find my more
common forms of leaking memory.