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Home/ Questions/Q 6161119
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Editorial Team
  • 0
Editorial Team
Asked: May 23, 20262026-05-23T21:25:35+00:00 2026-05-23T21:25:35+00:00

I’m having the famous segmentation fault. I’ve tracked it down to a single line

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I’m having the famous segmentation fault. I’ve tracked it down to a single line in the code (getline). Here’s someone with a similar issue, also on Ubuntu:

http://www.daniweb.com/software-development/cpp/threads/329191

Note that getline returns -1 after the segmentation fault, but it couldn’t have been really the end of the stream (in my case).

When the stream is smaller, everything goes ok. As we can deduce from the output, the segmentation fault is on line 98.

     1  /* 
     2   * File:   RequestDispatcher.cpp
     3   * Author: albert
     4   * 
     5   * Created on July 8, 2011, 7:15 PM
     6   */
     7  
     8  #include "iostream"
     9  #include "fstream"
    10  #include "stdlib.h"
    11  #include "stdio.h"
    12  #include "cstring"
    13  #include "algorithm"
    14  
    15  #include "RequestDispatcher.h"
    16  #include "Functions.h"
    17  
    18  #define PROXIES 1
    19  
    20  RequestDispatcher::RequestDispatcher()
    21  {
    22  }
    23  
    24  RequestDispatcher::RequestDispatcher(const RequestDispatcher& orig)
    25  {
    26  }
    27  
    28  RequestDispatcher::~RequestDispatcher()
    29  {
    30  }
    31  
    32  int RequestDispatcher::addRequest(string host, string request, IResponseReceiver* response_receiver)
    33  {
    34      RequestInfo info;
    35      info.request_index = request_info.size();
    36      info.host = host;
    37      info.request = request;
    38      info.response_receiver = response_receiver;
    39      request_info.push_back(info);
    40      return info.request_index;
    41  }
    42  
    43  void RequestDispatcher::run()
    44  {
    45      if (request_info.size()==0)
    46      {
    47          return;
    48      }
    49      FILE* pipe[PROXIES];
    50      int per_proxy = (request_info.size() + PROXIES - 1) / PROXIES;
    51      int count_pipes = (request_info.size() + per_proxy - 1) / per_proxy;
    52      for (int pipe_index=0; pipe_index<count_pipes; ++pipe_index)
    53      {
    54          int from = pipe_index * per_proxy;
    55          int to = min(from + per_proxy, int(request_info.size()));
    56          cout << "FROM: "<< from << "; TO: " << to;
    57          const char* cmd = generateCmd(from, to);
    58          pipe[pipe_index] = popen(cmd, "r");
    59          if (!pipe[pipe_index])
    60          {
    61              cerr << "Error executing command in RequestDispatcher::run()";
    62          }
    63      }
    64      string result[PROXIES];
    65      bool finished[PROXIES];
    66      for (int pipe_index=0; pipe_index<count_pipes; pipe_index++)
    67      {
    68          finished[pipe_index] = false;
    69      }
    70      int count_finished = 0;
    71      char* buffer;
    72      size_t buffer_length=1024;
    73      buffer = (char *) malloc (buffer_length + 1);
    74      while (count_finished < count_pipes)
    75      {
    76          cout << "D\n";
    77          fflush(stdout);
    78          for(int pipe_index=0; pipe_index<count_pipes; ++pipe_index)
    79          {
    80              cout << "E\n";
    81              fflush(stdout);
    82              if (finished[pipe_index])
    83              {
    84                  continue;
    85              }
    86              cout << "Getline" << buffer_length << "\n";
    87              ssize_t bytes_read = getline(&buffer, &buffer_length, pipe[pipe_index]);
    88              cout << "Getline Done ("<<bytes_read<< "," << buffer_length << ")\n";
    89              fflush(stdout);
    90              while (bytes_read>0)
    91              {
    92                  for (int i=0; i<bytes_read; i++)
    93                  {
    94                     result[pipe_index] += buffer[i];
    95                  }
    96                  cout << "P\n";
    97                  fflush(stdout);
    98                  bytes_read = getline(&buffer, &buffer_length, pipe[pipe_index]);
    99                  cout << "Bytes read ("<<bytes_read<<","<< buffer_length << ")\n";
   100                  fflush(stdout);
   101  
   102              }
   103              if (bytes_read == -1)  // then finished this pipe
   104              {
   105                  string* r = &result[pipe_index];
   106                  //cout << *r;
   107                  finished[pipe_index] = true;
   108                  ++count_finished;
   109                  cout << "HI\n";
   110                  fflush(stdout);
   111                  // delete trailing '\0' from result
   112                  pclose(pipe[pipe_index]);
   113                  result[pipe_index] = result[pipe_index].substr(0, result[pipe_index].length()-1);
   114                  int pos = r->find("RESPONSE_DATA");
   115                  int valuepos, endvaluepos;
   116                  int request_index, length;
   117                  string headers;
   118                  int headerslength;
   119                  string body;
   120                  int bodypos, bodylength;
   121                  while (pos!=r->npos)
   122                  {
   123                      valuepos = r->find("REQUEST_INDEX=", pos) + 14;
   124                      endvaluepos = r->find("\n", valuepos);
   125                      request_index = pipe_index * per_proxy + atoi(r->substr(valuepos, endvaluepos-valuepos).c_str());
   126  
   127                      cout << "REQUEST_INDEX " << request_index;
   128  
   129                      valuepos = r->find("LENGTH=", pos) + 7;
   130                      endvaluepos = r->find("\n", valuepos);
   131                      length = atoi(r->substr(valuepos, endvaluepos-valuepos).c_str());
   132  
   133                      pos = r->find("START", pos)+5;
   134                      bodypos = r->find("\r\n\r\n", pos)+4;
   135                      headerslength = bodypos-pos-4;
   136                      bodylength = length-headerslength-4;
   137                      headers = r->substr(pos, headerslength);
   138                      body = r->substr(bodypos, bodylength);
   139                      request_info[request_index].response_receiver->notifyResponse(headers, body, request_index);
   140  
   141                      pos=r->find("RESPONSE_DATA", pos+length);
   142                  }
   143              }
   144          }
   145      }
   146      cout << "\n?\n";
   147      fflush(stdout);
   148      free(buffer);
   149      request_info.clear();
   150  }
   151  
   152  const char* RequestDispatcher::generateCmd(int first_request, int to_request)
   153  {
   154      string r("/home/albert/apachebench-standalone-read-only/ab -a");
   155      for (int i=first_request; i<to_request; i++)
   156      {
   157          r.append(" '");
   158          r.append(request_info.at(i).request);
   159          r.append("'");
   160      }
   161      ofstream out("/home/albert/apachebench-standalone-read-only/debug");
   162      if(! out)
   163      {
   164          cerr<<"Cannot open output file\n";
   165          return "";
   166      }
   167      out << r.c_str();
   168      out.close();
   169      return "/home/albert/apachebench-standalone-read-only/debug";
   170      /*int size = strlen("/home/albert/apachebench-standalone-read-only/ab -a");
   171      for (int i=first_request; i<to_request; i++)
   172      {
   173          size += 2+strlen(request_info.at(i).request)+1;
   174          cout << "len: " << strlen(request_info.at(i).request) << "\n";
   175          cout << "total: " << size << "\n";
   176      }
   177      size += 1;
   178      char* cmd = new char[size];
   179      strcpy(cmd, "/home/albert/apachebench-standalone-read-only/ab -a");
   180      for (int i=first_request; i<to_request; i++)
   181      {
   182          cout << "LEN: " << strlen(cmd) << "\n";
   183          cout << "NEXT: " << strlen(request_info.at(i).request) << "\n";
   184          fflush(stdout);
   185          strcat(cmd, " '");
   186          strcat(cmd, request_info.at(i).request);
   187          strcat(cmd, "'");
   188      }
   189      cout << "LEN: " << strlen(cmd) << "\n";
   190      fflush(stdout);
   191      return cmd;*/
   192  }

When I run /home/albert/apachebench-standalone-read-only/debug from the command line everything works perfectly fine. It returns binary data.

The end of the output is:

P
Bytes read (272,6828)
P
Bytes read (42,6828)
P
Bytes read (464,6828)
P
Bytes read (195,6828)
P
Bytes read (355,6828)
P
Bytes read (69,6828)
P
Bytes read (111,6828)
P
Segmentation fault
Bytes read (368,6828)
P
Bytes read (-1,6828)
HI
REQUEST_INDEX 46REQUEST_INDEX 48REQUEST_INDEX 44REQUEST_INDEX 0REQUEST_INDEX 45
?

Mind the “?” for exiting the loop. After this, the program is finished.

By the way, I always thought the program would terminate on a segmentation fault (edit: I did not do anything to catch it).

In reply to some answers: There seem to be different versions of getline and I seem to be using the one documented here:

http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online/pages/man3/getline.3.html

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  1. Editorial Team
    Editorial Team
    2026-05-23T21:25:36+00:00Added an answer on May 23, 2026 at 9:25 pm

    So after some thought the issue I believe is that your buffer is being written to as you’re reading it. In some cases the buffer is not done being written to and you remove some of the data from it (which could mean that you may read an empty buffer because the write isn’t done). This is because you are using popen and simply piping data from another process. What I would recommend is that for one you use the C++ standard for getline (although both are somewhat unsafe) and that you have some leeway for reading data from the pipe. Retry logic might be what you need as I can’t think of a clean way to solve this. If anyone knows please post it, I’m posting this because this is what I believe to be the likely culprit of the problem.

    Also if you’re coding in C++ I highly recommend that you use the C++ libraries so that you’re not constantly mixing or casting between types (such as string to char * and such, it just saves you some hassle) and that you use the safer versions of methods so you avoid errors such as buffer overflows.

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