What is a wild pointer?

Question: What is a wild pointer in a program?

Uninitialized pointers are known as wild pointers. These are called so because they point to some arbitrary memory location and may cause a program to crash or behave badly.
This can be understood from the below examples.

int main()
{
    int *p;  // wild pointer, some unknown memory location is pointed

	*p = 12; // Some unknown memory location is being changed

	// This should never be done.
}

Please note that if a pointer p points to a known variable then it’s not a wild pointer. In the below program, p is a wild pointer till this points to a.

int main()
{
	int  *p; // wild pointer, some unknown memory is pointed
	int a = 10;

	p = &a;  // p is not a wild pointer now, since we know where p is pointing

	*p = 12; // This is fine. Value of a is changed
}

If we want pointer to a value (or set of values) without having a variable for the value, we should explicitly allocate memory and put the value in allocated memory.

int main()
{
	//malloc returns NULL if no free memory was found
	int *p = malloc(sizeof(int));

	//now we should check if memory was allocated or not
	if(p != NULL)
	{
		*p = 12; // This is fine (because malloc doesn't return NULL)
	}
	else
	{
		printf("MEMORY LIMIT REACHED");
	}
}