Freeing memory which has been allocated to an array of char pointers (strings). Do I have to free each string or just the “main” pointer?

Question

I have a function that takes a pointer to a char ** and fills it with strings (an array of strings I guess). *list_of_strings* is allocated memory inside the function.

Answer 1

won't that just free the actual pointers and not the memory each string itself was using?

Yes, indeed.

How do I completely free the memory

By looping through the array and freeing each string one by one before freeing up the array itself. E.g.

for (i = 0; i < SOMETHING; i++) {
    free(list[i]);
}
free(list);