Using valgrind to find out how an object is still reachable

Question

I use valgrind for memory leak detection. There was some code I was expecting to produce a memory leak, but valgrind did not detect it. Now I would like to find out in what way this object might still be reachable (this would be a problem in this case). Can valgrind output those references?

Answer 1

Upgrade to the (not yet released) 3.8.0 SVN version of Valgrind. You then have the following gdbserver monitor commands:

  block_list <loss_record_nr> after a leak search, shows the list of blocks of <loss_record_nr> who_points_at <addr> [<len>] shows places pointing inside <len> (default 1) bytes at <addr> (with len 1, only shows "start pointers" pointing exactly to <addr>, with len > 1, will also show "interior pointers")