Question

I am new to C and learning structs. I am trying to malloc a char pointer with size 30 but it is giving a segmentation fault(core dump). I searched it on the internet & SO but am not able to resolve this. Any help will be much appreciated.
Probably I am accessing the char* member of the struct incorrectly ?

typedef struct{
int x;
int y;
char *f;
char *l;
}str;

void create_mall();

void create_mall() //Malloc the struct
{
str *p;
p->f = (char*)malloc(sizeof(char)*30);  // segmentation fault here
p->l = (char*)malloc(sizeof(char)*30);
printf("Enter the user ID:");
scanf("%d",&p->x);
printf("\nEnter the phone number:");
scanf("%d",&p->y);
printf("\nEnter the First name:");
scanf("%29s",p->f);
printf("\nEnter the Last name:");
scanf("%29s",p->l);
printf("\nEntered values are: %d %d %s %s\n",p->x,p->y,p->f,p->l);
}

int main(void)
{
create_mall();
return 0;
}

Answer 1

Here’s your problem:

str *p;

You’ve declared a pointer to an instance of str, but you haven’t initialized it with a value. You either need to move this variable to the stack:

str p;

…or malloc some memory for it first:

str *p = (str*)malloc(sizeof(str));