“Any uninitialized pointer is known as a wild pointer in C because it points to some arbitrary memory location and can cause a program to crash or behave unexpectedly”. A wild pointer in C is declared but not initialized. That is why, it points to any random memory location.

In C programming, a wild pointer refers to a pointer that is uninitialized, or its value does not point to a valid memory location. Wild pointers are problematic because they can lead to undefined behavior when accessed or dereferenced.

When a pointer is declared but not assigned any valid memory address, it contains a garbage value, and attempting to access the memory location it points to can lead to unexpected results or crashes in the program. Wild pointers can also cause memory leaks if they are used to allocate memory dynamically and not properly deallocated.

Here’s an example of a wild pointer:

<span class="hljs-type">int</span> *ptr; <span class="hljs-comment">// Declaration of a pointer without initialization</span>

*ptr = <span class="hljs-number">10</span>; <span class="hljs-comment">// Accessing the memory location pointed to by ptr (undefined behavior)</span>


In the above code snippet, the pointer ptr is declared but not assigned any valid memory address. Consequently, it holds an indeterminate value. Dereferencing the pointer using *ptr to assign a value to the memory location it points to will result in undefined behavior since the pointer doesn’t point to a valid memory location.

To avoid wild pointers, it is crucial to initialize pointers properly before using them. This can be done by assigning them the address of a valid variable or by allocating memory dynamically using functions like malloc() or calloc(). It is also a good practice to set pointers to NULL when they are not pointing to anything, making it easier to identify and handle uninitialized pointers.