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Life & fun · February 6, 2025

Heap Explorer

I wrote a little LD_PRELOAD library that makes it easy to inspect and interact with a running program's glibc heap. It's fun to pause processes, free a bunch of their allocations, then resume them. Most of the time, the processes continue as though nothing happened, but sometimes they do interesting things :)

Heap Explorer launched on February 6, 2025 with 73 votes, #435 of 5,999 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.

Visit github.com ↗Heap Explorer alternativestop 7% of February 2025

In plain words

Heap Explorer is an LD_PRELOAD library that lets developers inspect and manipulate a running program's glibc heap. Users can pause processes, free memory allocations, then resume execution to observe how the program responds. It's designed for developers interested in understanding heap behavior and memory management, offering a hands-on way to experiment with how applications handle unexpected memory changes.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

LD_PRELOADable library for exploring the glibc heap - heap-exploitation/heap-explorer

void explore_heap ( void ); explore_heap starts a REPL that allows the user to perform a few different actions, such as free ing chunks, malloc ing chunks, printing freelists, etc. libheap_explorer.so installs explore_heap as the SIGINT handler at load time, so you can do stuff like this: $ LD_PRELOAD=/the/path/to/libheap_explorer.so python3 -c 'while True: print("Dave and Dale are cool cats")' Dave and Dale are cool cats Dave and Dale are cool cats Dave and Dale are cool cats ... ^C Welcome to Heap Explorer! You are TID 821537, viewing arena 0 (main_arena) 1. Allocate chunk(s). 2. Free a chunk. 3. Print this arena. 4. Print a tcache list. 5. Print a fastbin list. 6. Print a bin list. 7.…from github.com

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