Install Valgrind on Ubuntu 24.04

Valgrind is a command line tool for debugging and profiling programs, mainly in C and C++, by detecting memory leaks, invalid memory access, and performance bottlenecks. This tutorial demonstrates how to install Valgrind on Ubuntu 24.04.

Install Valgrind

Run the following command to update the package lists:

sudo apt update

Install Valgrind:

sudo apt install -y valgrind

We can check Valgrind version as follows:

valgrind --version

Testing Valgrind

To use Valgrind for detecting memory issues, you can run a command like:

valgrind --leak-check=full myprog arg1 arg2

This command runs the program under Valgrind's memory checking tool, with --leak-check=full enabling detailed detection of memory leaks. Replace myprog arg1 arg2 with the actual command. For example:

valgrind --leak-check=full echo "Hello world"

The output might look like this:

==1478== Memcheck, a memory error detector
==1478== Copyright (C) 2002-2022, and GNU GPL'd, by Julian Seward et al.
==1478== Using Valgrind-3.22.0 and LibVEX; rerun with -h for copyright info
==1478== Command: echo Hello\ world
==1478==
Hello world
==1478==
==1478== HEAP SUMMARY:
==1478==     in use at exit: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==1478==   total heap usage: 224 allocs, 224 frees, 13,343 bytes allocated
==1478==
==1478== All heap blocks were freed -- no leaks are possible
==1478==
==1478== For lists of detected and suppressed errors, rerun with: -s
==1478== ERROR SUMMARY: 0 errors from 0 contexts (suppressed: 0 from 0)

Uninstall Valgrind

To completely remove Valgrind and its associated dependencies, run the following command:

sudo apt purge --autoremove -y valgrind