When you exit a C application, is the malloc-ed memory automatically freed?

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It depends on the operating system. The majority of modern (and all major) operating systems will free memory not freed by the program when it ends.

Relying on this is bad practice and it is better to free it explicitly. The issue isn’t just that your code looks bad. You may decide you want to integrate your small program into a larger, long running one. Then a while later you have to spend hours tracking down memory leaks.
Relying on a feature of an operating system also makes the code less portable.

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