Making a deep copy of a struct…making a shallow copy of a struct

Question

There are questions LIKE this one, but they are not similar enough to my specific question FOR ME to pick up on.

My question is about how to make a deep copy of a struct

Answer 1

The code you have listed as making a shallow copy isn't; it will actually smash the stack and probably crash the program.

Student *s1 = create_Student("Bo","Diddly", 100, 221);
Student *s2 = create_Student("Leeroy","Jenkins",50,1337);
memcpy(&s2,&s1,sizeof(Student)); //shallow copy of s1 INTO s2?

If you had the size right, that would be the same as s2 = s1;. But since you have the size wrong, it is copying too much and will overwrite whatever is in memory after s2. To do a real shallow copy, leave off the &:

memcpy(s2,s1,sizeof(Student)); //shallow copy of s1 INTO s2

The code you have for a deep copy is similarly wrong, but you're on the right track. The basic idea behind a deep copy is that you have to copy each field; for non-pointer types this is the same as a shallow copy, but for pointers you have to do something smarter. The code you posted, however, isn't doing that. Try this instead.

void copy_Student(Student *s1, Student *s2)
{
    s2 -> grade = s1 -> grade;
    s2 -> id = s2 -> id;
    s2 -> first_name = strdup(s1 -> first_name);
    s2 -> last_name = strdup(s1 -> last_name);
}

Note that to avoid memory leaks, you would also need to free the old names from s2 before assigning the new copies, make a free_Student function that would free these names, and also make sure that create_Student copies the names in the first place (or else include "should free" flags so you don't have to copy literal strings).

Now, for a struct without pointers (or other reference types), there is no difference between a deep and a shallow copy because the data structure it itself shallow.