Question

Came across an interesting interview question:

test 1:
printf("test %s\n", NULL);
printf("test %s\n", NULL);

prints:
test (null)
test (null)

test 2:
printf("%s\n", NULL);
printf("%s\n", NULL);
prints
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Though this might run fine on some systems, at least mine is throwing a segmentation fault.
What would be the best explanation of this behavior? Above code is in C.

Following is my gcc info:

deep@deep:~$ gcc --version
gcc (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.3-1ubuntu5) 4.6.3

Answer 1

First things first: printf is expecting a valid (i.e. non-NULL)
pointer for its %s argument so passing it a NULL is officially
undefined. It may print "(null)" or it may delete all files on your
hard drive–either is correct behavior as far as ANSI is concerned
(at least, that’s what Harbison and Steele tells me.)

That being said, yeah, this is really wierd behavior. It turns out
that what’s happening is that when you do a simple printf like this:

printf("%s\n", NULL);

gcc is (ahem) smart enough to deconstruct this into a call to
puts. The first printf, this:

printf("test %s\n", NULL);

is complicated enough that gcc will instead emit a call to real
printf.

(Notice that gcc emits warnings about your invalid printf argument
when you compile. That’s because it long ago developed the ability to
parse *printf format strings.)

You can see this yourself by compiling with the -save-temps option
and then looking through the resulting .s file.

When I compiled the first example, I got:

movl    $.LC0, %eax
movl    $0, %esi
movq    %rax, %rdi
movl    $0, %eax
call    printf      ; <-- Actually calls printf!

(Comments were added by me.)

But the second one produced this code:

movl    $0, %edi    ; Stores NULL in the puts argument list
call    puts        ; Calls puts

Note that this optimization is correct, i.e. it produces the same result for valid strings; notably puts prints a newline character after the string.