Data Utilities

Data utility functions, largely from <stdlib.h>, provide general-purpose operations such as memory allocation (malloc, free), converting strings to numbers (atoi, strtol), generating pseudo-random numbers (rand), and sorting or searching arrays (qsort, bsearch). They cover common tasks that come up across many kinds of programs regardless of domain. Because they are part of the standard library, they are available on any standards-compliant C implementation without extra installation.