Review Suggested Edit

I recently told a friend that `malloc(n)` allocates and returns a pointer to a block of *at least N* bytes of memory, as opposed to *exactly N*; that it is allowed to allocate 'extra' memory to meet e.g. alignment requirements.

He asked what the C standard had to say about this behaviour. I wasn't sure, so I looked it up, and...I can't find any explicit statement on the subject.

Did I miss something in the standard, or was I wrong to begin with? What is `malloc`'s standard-defined behaviour with respect to the block of memory it returns?

(this discussion was in the context of a single-byte buffer-overrun bug that only manifested when N was a multiple of 8; it certainly *looked* like malloc was rounding up to the word size, although obviously trying to use any such slop is still a bug)