arena

programming The area of memory attached to a Unix process

by the brk and sbrk system calls and used by malloc as

dynamic storage. So named from a "malloc: corrupt arena"

message emitted when some early versions detected an

impossible value in the free block list.

See overrun screw, aliasing bug, memory leak, memorysmash, smash the stack.

[Jargon File]

(1995-12-28)