CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++clinuxsegmentation-faultsignals
Ziqi Liu
Ziqi Liu

Reputation: 3171

catch all signal equivalent to catch all segment fault?

I'm wondering if there is a way to catch all segment fault/core dump, and print its callstack? Catching all signals look like a doable way, but I'm not pretty sure how it works, according to some of my experience, it did not always give the outcome I want, sometimes it just failed to catch that core dump, maybe I did something wrong.

The reason I ask this is that I usually debug with a very complicated system, and many segmentfault errors are hard to reproduce, and not practical to run it with gdb line by line. So if I can catch all segmentfault and print some call stack or other information, that would be great to help me debugging.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 125

Answers (1)

eerorika
eerorika

Reputation: 238431

I'm wondering if there is a way to catch all segment fault ...

Certainly. This can be achieved by registering a signal handler using std::signal.

... and print its callstack?

This is a quite a lot trickier. There is no standard way to inspect that call stack in C++. Linux has several ways, but unfortunately the most conventional way of using the POSIX standard backtrace function is not async-signal safe, so there is no guarantee that it would work in a signal handler.

A simpler approach is to not do this in a signal handler, but instead configure Linux to generate a core dump. You'll get much more information out of that.

... core dump, and print its callstack?

Certainly. You can use a debugger:

gdb /path/to/executable /path/to/corefile

(gdb) bt

and not practical to run it with gdb line by line.

Then run it in gdb but not line by line. Simply run the program within gdb until it segfaults, then print the backtrace.

Upvotes: 2

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