segfault with free

Question

Can someone tell me why this code segfaults? I've read the man pages for both malloc and free and everything seems in order. Furthermore, most issues seem to come from assigning strings to memory allocated by malloc, but that is clearly not the issue here.

FILE *inFile = fopen(inptr, "r");
if(inFile == NULL){
    fprintf(stderr, "Couldn't open input file\n");
    return 2;
}

FILE *outFile = fopen(outptr, "w");
if(outFile == NULL){
    fprintf(stderr, "Couldn't create output file\n");
    return 2;
}


char *temp = malloc((fileLength + 1)* sizeof(char));

fread(&temp, fileLength, 1, inFile);
fwrite(&temp, sizeof(temp), 1, outFile);

fclose(inFile);
fclose(outFile);

free(temp);

Answer 1

Two problems:

1. temp is a pointer (address) by itself and you allocate some memory started at this address by malloc. &temp is another address temporarily created by computer as a pointer to temp. You need to read from and write to temp, not &temp.

2. temp is a variable of pointer type. So sizeof(temp) == sizeof(type pointer) == 8 (for 64bit system), no matter what fileLength is. In the same manner as sizeof(1) == sizeof(1000000) == sizeof(type int) = 4.