Avoid unnecessary "if-before-free" tests.

This change removes all obvious useless if-before-free tests.
E.g., it replaces code like this:

        if (some_expression)
                free (some_expression);

with the now-equivalent:

        free (some_expression);

It is equivalent not just because POSIX has required free(NULL)
to work for a long time, but simply because it has worked for
so long that no reasonable porting target fails the test.
Here's some evidence from nearly 1.5 years ago:

    http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-patches/2006-October/031544.html

FYI, the change below was prepared by running the following:

  git ls-files -z | xargs -0 \
  perl -0x3b -pi -e \
    's/\bif\s*\(\s*(\S+?)(?:\s*!=\s*NULL)?\s*\)\s+(free\s*\(\s*\1\s*\))/$2/s'

Note however, that it doesn't handle brace-enclosed blocks like
"if (x) { free (x); }".  But that's ok, since there were none like
that in git sources.

Beware: if you do use the above snippet, note that it can
produce syntactically invalid C code.  That happens when the
affected "if"-statement has a matching "else".
E.g., it would transform this

  if (x)
    free (x);
  else
    foo ();

into this:

  free (x);
  else
    foo ();

There were none of those here, either.

If you're interested in automating detection of the useless
tests, you might like the useless-if-before-free script in gnulib:
[it *does* detect brace-enclosed free statements, and has a --name=S
 option to make it detect free-like functions with different names]

  http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnulib.git;a=blob;f=build-aux/useless-if-before-free

Addendum:
  Remove one more (in imap-send.c), spotted by Jean-Luc Herren <jlh@gmx.ch>.

Signed-off-by: Jim Meyering <meyering@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/xdiff-interface.c b/xdiff-interface.c
index 4b8e5cca80..bba236428a 100644
--- a/xdiff-interface.c
+++ b/xdiff-interface.c
@@ -233,8 +233,7 @@ void xdiff_set_find_func(xdemitconf_t *xecfg, const char *value)
 			expression = value;
 		if (regcomp(&reg->re, expression, 0))
 			die("Invalid regexp to look for hunk header: %s", expression);
-		if (buffer)
-			free(buffer);
+		free(buffer);
 		value = ep + 1;
 	}
 }