About once every three times I run my program, malloc reports a double free error; e.g.
myprogram(703,0xb06d9000) malloc: *** error for object 0x17dd0240: double free
*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
I’ve run the same code through valgrind more than a dozen times but it never reports a double free.
I ran the code through gdb with a breakpoint on malloc_error_break and (when the bug occurs) the error is always reported in a standard c++ library function. I isolated the parent function and valgrinded it in a test unit but no errors.
I think the parent function/standard c++ library is not to blame, it is simply freeing something it allocated but some other function in the parent program freed.
I’ve tried looking up which object is double freed but my gdb skills aren’t up to finding the first object that was freed. Please help me find which object caused the first free and additionally any help to why my progam generates this error. Thank you.
The parent function boils down to:
int i;
double px, py;
int start, finish;
std::string comment;
std::vector<double> x, y;
std::fstream myfile;
myfile.open("filename.txt", std::ios_base::in);
// Read header
std::getline(myfile, comment);
// Read data
while(!myfile.eof())
{
myfile >> comment >> start >> comment >> finish;
for(i = 0; i <= finish-start; i++)
{
myfile >> px >> py; // double free here
x.push_back(px);
y.push_back(py);
}
}
EDIT:
My data file is something like this:
Comment: My Data
start 33 end 36
10.2 139.0076
9.22616 141.584
8.62802 141.083
8.87098 141.813
start 33 end 35
300.354 405
301.698 404.029
303.369 403.953
start 33 end 35
336.201 148.07
334.616 147.243
334.735 146.09
The backtrace from gdb is
(gdb) backtrace
#0 0x93c2d4a9 in malloc_error_break ()
#1 0x93c28497 in szone_error ()
#2 0x93b52503 in szone_free ()
#3 0x93b5236d in free ()
#4 0x93b51f24 in localeconv_l ()
#5 0x93c18163 in strtod_l$UNIX2003 ()
#6 0x93c192e0 in strtod$UNIX2003 ()
#7 0x919b76e8 in std::__convert_to_v<double> ()
#8 0x919983cf in std::num_get<char, std::istreambuf_iterator<char, std::char_traits<char> > >::do_get ()
#9 0x91991671 in std::num_get<char, std::istreambuf_iterator<char, std::char_traits<char> > >::get ()
#10 0x9198d2dc in std::istream::operator>> ()
Just to reiterate, I need help to find which object was freed the first time, I’m not so interested in refactoring my code for this function – which I don’t believe is causing the problem; unless you can find something catastrophic in it.
EDIT: Changed the example code.
You appear to be using Mac OSX (you should have divulged that fact 🙂
There are several environment variables which can help you debug heap corruption.
In particular,
MallocStackLoggingNoCompactlooks very promising.Here is what I see:
This first part of the history we don’t actually care about:
But here is the interesting stuff: