Attempting to dereference an invalid pointer results in undefined behavior, typically abnormal program termination. Given this, invalid pointers should not be dereferenced.
Non-
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Compliant Code Example
In this example, input_str is copied into dynamically allocated memory referenced by str. If malloc() fails, it returns an invalid (null) pointer that is assigned to str. When str is dereferenced in strcpy(), the program behaves in an unpredictable manner.
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