What is "sbrk"

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 data segment of the process. 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 data space; later versions allowed this to also be done using the [[mmap]] call.