On Thu, 19 Jul 2012, Jesús Cea Avión wrote:

>
> Jesús Cea Avión <jcea@jcea.es> added the comment:
>
> Thanks for the patch, Julia, and for submitting the contributor form. I have added you too to the "Doc/ACKS.txt" file.
>
> I wonder how you found this...

My PhD student Suman Saha has developed a tool that finds faults in error 
handling code by checking whether the error handling code within a 
function is self-consistent.  So if one failure branch frees x, and the 
next one does not, there is a problem, unless x was freed along the way.

A preliminary description of the work is in the following paper:

S. Saha, Julia L. Lawall, G. Muller : “Finding Resource-Release Omission 
Faults in Linux”, 6th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating 
Systems, Cascais, Portugal (2011)

http://pagesperso-systeme.lip6.fr/Suman.Saha/src/plos11.pdf

That paper just has results for Linux, but we are working on applying it 
to other software, including python.

julia