JG> My guess is that adding the const makes it so that callers can't JG> modify the resulting string, Right, which makes free() choke on it, thus indicating all the free()'s that I needed to remove in this case :) JG> which means that we can just hand them all pointers to the same JG> string, so there is no need to strdup, so they don't have to free? No. The const doesn't really have anything to do with not needing to free() it. The reason it doesn't need to be free()'d is because it's memory from a broker-managed object, which will be freed when the current provider returns back to the CIMOM. The same reason you don't need to free() a CMPIInstance or CMPIObjectPath. -- Dan Smith IBM Linux Technology Center Open Hypervisor Team email: danms@us.ibm.com