Is it fine to leak memory in a fork-exec child process?

I am calling strdup to convert std::string to char * to pass as arguments for execvp. My doubt is, I never call free on that returned pointer. Is it a safe thing to do? Does it follow the best practices?

Code below:
std::string runCommand(const std::string &command) {

std::string result;

int fd[2];

if (pipe(fd) == -1) {

throw std::runtime_error("pipe() failed!");

}

pid_t pid = fork();

if (pid == -1) {

throw std::runtime_error("fork() failed!");

}

if (pid == 0) {

close(fd[0]); // Close read end

dup2(fd[1], STDOUT_FILENO); // Redirect stdout to pipe

dup2(fd[1], STDERR_FILENO); // Redirect stderr to pipe

close(fd[1]); // Close write end

// Convert command string into an array of arguments

std::vector<char*> args;

std::istringstream iss(command);

std::string token;

while (iss >> token) {

args.push_back(strdup(token.c_str())); // !! strdup - not freed later

}

args.push_back(nullptr);

execvp(args[0], args.data());

exit(EXIT_FAILURE); // exit child on failure

} else {

close(fd[1]); // Close write end

char buffer[1024];

ssize_t bytesRead;

while ((bytesRead = read(fd[0], buffer, sizeof(buffer) - 1)) > 0) {

buffer[bytesRead] = '\0'; // Null-terminate buffer

result += buffer;

}

close(fd[0]); // Close read end

waitpid(pid, nullptr, 0); // Wait for child to finish

}

return result;

}