Question about emalloc

Not too sure if I am in the right place, but here goes... I am working on writing my own module and so far seem to be doing OK, but I have one quick question. In the Memory Management section of the manual (Ch. 26) it says: "emalloc(), estrdup(), estrndup(), ecalloc(), and erealloc() allocate internal memory; efree() frees these previously allocated blocks. Memory handled by the e*() functions is considered local to the current process and is discarded as soon as the script executed by this process is terminated." Does this mean that I can emalloc a string and not have to worry about efree()'ing it at the end? Also, if it is local to the process, how can it be used to pass values out of a function? regards, Mikey "If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day. If you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime."