That's a fairly common trap for new C coders. Setting a pointer to something on the stack and then returning that pointer when you exit the function. It's ext

That's a fairly common trap for new C coders. Setting a pointer to something on the stack and then returning that pointer when you exit the function. It's extra insidious because it will appear to be working fine until you call another function and then try to dereference the pointer. Then your data suddenly becomes corrupt even though your program was nowhere near it.