Cppcheck understands many common allocation and deallocation functions. But not all.

Here is example code that might leak memory or resources:

void foo(int x)
{
    void *f = CreateFred();
    if (x == 1)
        return;
    DestroyFred(f);
}

If you analyse that with Cppcheck it won't find any leaks:

cppcheck --enable=possibleError fred1.cpp

You can add some custom leaks checking by providing simple implementations for the allocation and deallocation functions. Write this in a separate file:

void *CreateFred()
{
    return malloc(100);
}

void DestroyFred(void *p)
{
    free(p);
}

When Cppcheck see this it understands that CreateFred will return allocated memory and that DestroyFred will deallocate memory.

Now, execute Cppcheck this way:

cppcheck --append=fred.cpp fred1.cpp

The output from cppcheck is:

Checking fred1.cpp...
[fred1.cpp:5]: (error) Memory leak: f