Question

I have an object which has both a copy constructor and assignment operator defined. It is enclosed inside a shared pointer.

I want to make another shared pointer that contains a copy of the original shared pointer (i.e. new shared pointer to a new memory location, which however, has the same data as the original object).

Thanks for any assistance.

Answer 1

You invoke the copy constructor when creating the new object:

std::shared_ptr<C> ptr1(new C());      // invokes the default constructor
std::shared_ptr<C> ptr2(new C(*ptr1)); // invokes the copy constructor

In this case, it’s really no different than if you have regular, dumb pointers.