What are Wild Pointers? How can we avoid?

Uninitialized pointers are known as wild pointers because they point to some arbitrary memory location and may cause a program to crash or behave badly.
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print?
int main()
{
int *p; /* wild pointer */
*p = 12; /* Some unknown memory location is being corrupted. This should never be done. */
}

Please note that if a pointer p points to a known variable then it’s not a wild pointer. In the below program, p is a wild pointer till this points to a.
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print?
int main()
{
int *p; /* wild pointer */
int a = 10;
p = &a; /* p is not a wild pointer now*/
*p = 12; /* This is fine. Value of a is changed */
}

If we want pointer to a value (or set of values) without having a variable for the value, we should explicitly allocate memory and put the value in allocated memory.
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print?
int main()
{
int *p = malloc(sizeof(int));
*p = 12; /* This is fine (assuming malloc doesn't return NULL) */
}