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On my UNIX days I used it as poor man's solution to track memory leaks, by overriding malloc()/free(), this was done at dynamic linker level, not the process.

So I checked and apparently this no longer works since AT_SECURE exists, around 2.6.0 time frame.

It has been a while since I cared to do this on GNU/Linux, maybe around 2002.

So thanks for forcing me to update myself.

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> On my UNIX days I used it as poor man's solution to track memory leaks, by overriding malloc()/free(),

That's not a poor man's solution. That's how Valgrind's leak checker works (AFAIK).

Valgrind's leak checker is far more complicated than a simple malloc replacement. It's a virtual machine that runs the program being debugged.

It is poor man's solution, because on the cases there was money to spare, we could use Purify.

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