Question

After doing lot of research in Google, I found this program:

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
    int val;
    char *a = (char*) 0x1000;
    *a = 20;
    val = *a;
    printf("%d", val);
}

But it is throwing a run time error, at *a = 20.

So how can I write and read a specific memory location?

Answer 1

This is throwing a segment violation (SEGFAULT), as it should, as you don’t know what is put in that address. Most likely, that is kernel space, and the hosting environment doesn’t want you willy-nilly writing to another application’s memory. You should only ever write to memory that you KNOW your program has access to, or you will have inexplicable crashes at runtime.