Why does valgrind report a memory leak when calling `pcap_open_offline`?

Question

I am trying to figure out if I'm having an idiot moment or if there really is a memory leak in libpcap. I'm running Ubuntu 17.10 and libpcap 1.8.1-5ubuntu1. It seems unlikely that such a mature library would have a leak.

I've cut out everything to make a MVCE, so as a consequence, this code doesn't really do much of anything except demonstrate the leak:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <pcap.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
        char errbuf[PCAP_ERRBUF_SIZE];

        pcap_t *fd = pcap_open_offline(argv[1], errbuf);

        if (!fd) {
                printf("error: %s\n", errbuf);
        }

        free(fd); fd = 0;

        return 0;
}

The valgrind report (emphasis added):

==6871==
==6871== HEAP SUMMARY:
==6871==     in use at exit: 262,696 bytes in 2 blocks
==6871==   total heap usage: 4 allocs, 2 frees, 267,432 bytes allocated
==6871==
==6871== Searching for pointers to 2 not-freed blocks
==6871== Checked 73,072 bytes
==6871==
==6871== 262,144 bytes in 1 blocks are definitely lost in loss record 2 of 2

==6871==
==6871== LEAK SUMMARY:
==6871==    definitely lost: 262,144 bytes in 1 blocks
==6871==    indirectly lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==6871==      possibly lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==6871==    still reachable: 552 bytes in 1 blocks
==6871==         suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==6871== Reachable blocks (those to which a pointer was found) are not shown.
==6871== To see them, rerun with: --leak-check=full --show-leak-kinds=all
==6871==
==6871== ERROR SUMMARY: 1 errors from 1 contexts (suppressed: 0 from 0)
==6871== ERROR SUMMARY: 1 errors from 1 contexts (suppressed: 0 from 0)

Answer 1

From the libpcap manpage , edited slightly:

pcap_fopen_offline() return[s] a pointer to a pcap_t , which is the handle used for reading packets… To close a handle, use pcap_close() .

free(fd) just frees a single block of memory, since free() knows nothing about the internals of a pcap_t . In order to properly dispose of allocated resources, you need to use pcap_close(fd) instead, as the documentation indicates.