Question

I am getting “Bus Error” trying to read stdin into a char* variable.
I just want to read whole stuff coming over stdin and put it first into a variable, then continue working on the variable.

My Code is as follows:

char* content;
char* c;
while( scanf( "%c", c)) {
 strcat( content, c);
}

fprintf( stdout, "Size: %d", strlen( content));

But somehow I always get “Bus error” returned by calling cat test.txt | myapp, where myapp is the compiled code above.

My question is how do i read stdin until EOF into a variable? As you see in the code, I just want to print the size of input coming over stdin, in this case it should be equal to the size of the file test.txt.

I thought just using scanf would be enough, maybe buffered way to read stdin?

Answer 1

First, you’re passing uninitialized pointers, which means scanf and strcat will write memory you don’t own. Second, strcat expects two null-terminated strings, while c is just a character. This will again cause it to read memory you don’t own. You don’t need scanf, because you’re not doing any real processing. Finally, reading one character at a time is needlessly slow. Here’s the beginning of a solution, using a resizable buffer for the final string, and a fixed buffer for the fgets call

#define BUF_SIZE 1024
char buffer[BUF_SIZE];
size_t contentSize = 1; // includes NULL
/* Preallocate space.  We could just allocate one char here, 
but that wouldn't be efficient. */
char *content = malloc(sizeof(char) * BUF_SIZE);
if(content == NULL)
{
    perror("Failed to allocate content");
    exit(1);
}
content[0] = '\0'; // make null-terminated
while(fgets(buffer, BUF_SIZE, stdin))
{
    char *old = content;
    contentSize += strlen(buffer);
    content = realloc(content, contentSize);
    if(content == NULL)
    {
        perror("Failed to reallocate content");
        free(old);
        exit(2);
    }
    strcat(content, buffer);
}

if(ferror(stdin))
{
    free(content);
    perror("Error reading from stdin.");
    exit(3);
}

EDIT: As Wolfer alluded to, a NULL in your input will cause the string to be terminated prematurely when using fgets. getline is a better choice if available, since it handles memory allocation and does not have issues with NUL input.