Should I free the strdup pointer after basename / dirname in C?

I want to use a POSIX feature basename

(as opposed to GNU).

From the man page:

Both dirname () and basename () can change the contents of the path, so it might be desirable to pass a copy when calling one of these functions.

These functions can return pointers to statically allocated memory, which can be overwritten by subsequent calls. On the other hand, they can return a pointer to some part of the path , so that the string specified in the path should not be modified or freed until the pointer returned by the function is no longer required.

It also says:

RETURN VALUE
       Both dirname () and basename () return pointers to null terminated strings. ( Do not omit these pointers to free (3).)

So the example suggests something like:

EXAMPLE

       char *dirc, *basec, *bname, *dname;
       char *path = "/etc/passwd";

       dirc = strdup(path);
       basec = strdup(path);
       dname = dirname(dirc);
       bname = basename(basec);
       printf("dirname=%s, basename=%s\n", dname, bname);

      

        
        
        
      

    

The man page strdup

( strndup

) says:

The memory for the newline is obtained with malloc (3) and can be freed with free (3).

So the question is: should I free dirc and basec (according to strdup

) or not (according to basename

)?