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Asked: 2026-06-07T19:13:33+00:00

I am reading the book – C Interfaces and Implementations by David Hanson. This

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I am reading the book – “C Interfaces and Implementations” by David Hanson. This exercise questions seems interesting and am unable to find a solution:

On some systems, a program can invoke a debugger on itself when it has
detected an error. This facility is particularly useful during
development, when assertion failures may be common.

Can you provide a short example on how to invoke a debugger.

void handle_seg_fault(int arg)
{
    /* how to invoke debugger from within here */
}

int main()
{
    int *ptr = NULL;
    signal(SIGSEGV, handle_seg_fault);
    /* generate segmentation fault */
    *ptr = 1;
}
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Elaborating on Christian.K’s comment, fork()ing a debugger in the face of something like a SIGFPE or SIGSEGV might not be the best of ideas, because…

    1. your program is potentially corrupt to begin with, making the fork() unsafe;
    2. you might want to use something different for debugging than what the program has hardcoded;
    3. the average application user does not know how to handle a debugger;
    4. anyone competent with a debugger will usually prefer the coredump over the auto-invoked debugger.

    A coredump that I can copy to a testbed beats a debugger instance at my customer’s workplace any time of the day. A debugger interface makes for a lousy end-user error message.

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