Hello. I can put it off no more, I have to learn to use gdb. So, I have a program which crashes with segmentation fault. I see with gdb that it's in some mysterious strlen ().

Ok, so far so good. How do I find how this relates to my sourcecode? I mean, how do I find the line that causes this to happen? Thank you

bt
It will give you call stack, or BackTrace. So you'll see every call that finally led you to the problem, if stack is not corrupted (which is not guaranteed) you'll see even pre-main() initialization code.

If your just starting out with using gdb I also recommend you download and print out a copy of the GDB Quick Reference PDF.

Hi -

1. GDB is a very powerful tool.
Here's a tutorial that might be a little less intimidating to start off with:
http://oucsace.cs.ohiou.edu/~bhumphre/gdb.html

2. "strlen" is the standard C library function to get "string length".

It's almost certainly *not* the problem.

You're probably calling "strlen" with a bad string.

Or calling some function that calls a function that calls "strlen" with a bad string.

In any case, "bt" (or, equivalently, "where") are your friends.

'Hope that helps .. PSM

Thanks dude =)) =)) I only called it mysterious because sometime in the past I had a program with many strlen () calls and one was causing a segfault. It was just an example, and yes, I am quite sure the problem is probably a null pointer or smth like that. Yesterday I had a problem with memcpy () (PLEASE don't explain me what that does ) and there were many memcpy calls in my program. Anyway thank you very much for your help, I really appreciate it. Cheers.

Hi, again -

Fair enough - I get that you're familiar with "strlen ()".

For whatever it's worth, the two points I had tried to make were:

1) GDB can be formidable (heck, the GDB "cheat sheet" jtshaw referred you to might appear formidable!), but it can also be really easy. In general, you'll only need four or five GDB commands most of the time (including "where" and "quit").

So if you're not already familiar with GDB, please definitely avail yourself of a brief, simple tutorial like this one:
http://oucsace.cs.ohiou.edu/~bhumphre/gdb.html

2) The second point I wanted to make is that, even though "strlen()" might appear to be the culprit, it's very probably two or three (or more!) steps removed from the root cause.

So don't get hung up on "strlen()" itself. You mentioned NULL pointers - that's certainly possible. A string that *doesn't* have a NULL terminator is also a candidate. And a string that *used* to have a NULL terminator ... until somebody else accidentally *overwrote* it ... is even likelier.

Happy hunting!

Your .. PSM

PS:
You might also wish to consider tools like Valgrind or Electric Fence...

I am really beginning to understand that gdb is really something. I really didn't know strlen() crashes if there is no NULL terminator. This could really come in handy in the future. Again, thank you.