Passing --enable-mcheck or --enable-debug will add "-lmcheck", which will do the same thing as MALLOC_CHECK_=2 without it having to be specified every time. I encourage everyone to use at least --enable-debug and --enable-fatal-asserts if you can. ;) See this page for more information: http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Heap-Consistency-Checking.html