C - freeing structs

Question

Let\'s say I have this struct

typedef struct person{
    char firstName[100], surName[51]
} PERSON;

and I am allocating space by malloc and

Answer 1

Because you defined the struct as consisting of char arrays, the two strings are the structure and freeing the struct is sufficient, nor is there a way to free the struct but keep the arrays. For that case you would want to do something like struct { char *firstName, *lastName; }, but then you need to allocate memory for the names separately and handle the question of when to free that memory.

Aside: Is there a reason you want to keep the names after the struct has been freed?