c技巧：用指针的指针移除单链表中元素

今天看到linus曾经提到的一个指针的指针操作单链表的技巧，挺有意思的，记录一下。

原文：

http://meta.slashdot.org/story/12/10/11/0030249/linus-torvalds-answers-your-questions

I've seen too many people whodelete a singly-linked list entry by keeping track of the "prev"entry, and then to delete the entry, doing something like

if (prev)
prev->next = entry->next;
else
list_head = entry->next;

and whenever I see code like that, I just go "This person doesn'tunderstand pointers". And it's sadly quite common.

People who understand pointers just use a "pointer to the entrypointer", and initialize that with the address of the list_head. Andthen as they traverse the list, they can remove the entry withoutusing any conditionals, by just doing a "*pp = entry->next".

即，在单链表中删除元素时，通常的做法是判断待删除元素的prev是否存在，如果存在则让该元素的prev的next指向该元素的next，如果prev不存在，则让list_head指向该元素的next:

Node* entry = list_head;
Node* prev = NULL;
while(entry){
    if(entry->needRemove()){  
        if(prev)
            prev->next = entry->next;
        else
            list_head = entry->next;

  
        Node *next = entry->next;  

        free(entry);
        entry = next;
    }
    else{ 
        prev = entry;
        entry = entry->next;
 }
}

linus说，这么做的人不懂指针。。。高手就是高手，霸气。

好吧，看看linus的做法：

Node** pp = &list_head;

while(*pp){
    if((*pp)->needRemove()){
        Node* entry = *pp;
        *pp = entry->next;
        free(entry);
    }
    else{
        pp = &(*pp)->next;
    }
}

用指针的指针去遍历单链表，如果不去删除元素，当然是没有必要，但是如果要删除元素，简单的一句：*pp = entry->next 就可以达到prev->next=entry->next的效果，而且不用判断prev是否存在，因为pp永远指向prev->next，当没有prev时, pp指向list_head。且不用在删除前保存prev这个指针。

不得不说，确实精妙。