> You see this in a lot of older "top-to-bottom" C programs: they allocate, they clean up system resources (using longjmp to one label), but they don't bother w

> You see this in a lot of older "top-to-bottom" C programs: they allocate, they clean up system resources (using longjmp to one label), but they don't bother with free. When the program exits the OS gets all that memory back anyway, so why bother? You don't need to bother with releasing other types of resources either though (files, sockets, threads, ...), since the operating system will take care of that on process exit (unless you are on AmigaOS). The only reason to free memory is to recycle that memory in other allocations in long running applications without grabbing new memory from the OS. For one-shot command line tools it's usually not needed.