Sbrk

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brk and sbrk are basic memory management system calls used in Unix and Unix-like operating systems to control the amount of memory allocated to the heap segment of the process.^[1] These functions are typically called from a higher-level memory management library function such as malloc. In the original Unix system, brk and sbrk were the only ways in which applications could acquire additional heap space; later versions allowed this to also be done using the mmap call.^[2][3]