What are Wild Pointers? How can we avoid?

Uninitialized pointers are known as wild pointers because they point to some arbitrary memory location and may cause a program to crash or behave unexpectedly.

Example of Wild Pointers

In the below code, p is a wild pointer.

// C program that demonstrated wild pointers int main() {  /* wild pointer */  int* p;  /* Some unknown memory location is being corrupted.  This should never be done. */  *p = 12; } 

How can we avoid wild pointers?

If a pointer points to a known variable then it's not a wild pointer.

Example

In the below program, p is a wild pointer till this points to a.

int main() {  int* p; /* wild pointer */  int a = 10;  /* p is not a wild pointer now*/  p = &a;  /* This is fine. Value of a is changed */  *p = 12; } 

If we want a pointer to a value (or set of values) without having a variable for the value, we should explicitly allocate memory and put the value in the allocated memory.

Example

int main() {  int* p = (int*)malloc(sizeof(int));  // This is fine (assuming malloc doesn't return  // NULL)  *p = 12; }