Question

I am learning TDD and using CppUTest in eclipse.
Is there any way to debug my code getting a nagging segmentation fault.

Thanks

Answer 1

I don’t know anything special in CppUTest or Eclipse to help you, but some generic segfault debugging ideas seem appropriate here:

• Add flushing print statements (e.g. printf(…) + fflush(stdout) or fprintf(stderr, …)) to your code and see what gets printed. Do this in a binary search fashion with just a few prints at a time until you narrow down exactly where it is crashing. This sounds old fashioned but is extremely effective. Here is a guide I found googling that talks about this well-known technique: http://www.floccinaucinihilipilification.net/blog/2011/3/24/debugging-via-binary-search.html

• Compile your code with debugging symbols and run it in a debugger. When you hit your segfault, ask for a backtrace and see if you can figure out what happened. When doing this it can be especially helpful to use a graphical debugger.

• Run your code with a debugging tool like a debug malloc library or something from the valgrind suite. This may catch problems that are root causes of your segfaults but aren’t occuring at the exact place where the segfault is generated (e.g. double frees, out of bound array access clobbering pointers used later, etc).