Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Dereferencing a null pointer is undefined behavior in C, [7] and a conforming implementation is allowed to assume that any pointer that is dereferenced is not null. In practice, dereferencing a null pointer may result in an attempted read or write from memory that is not mapped, triggering a segmentation fault or memory access
Another frequent source of dangling pointers is a jumbled combination of malloc() and free() library calls: a pointer becomes dangling when the block of memory it points to is freed. As with the previous example one way to avoid this is to make sure to reset the pointer to null after freeing its reference—as demonstrated below.
Dereferencing a null pointer in C produces undefined behavior, [7] which could be catastrophic. However, most implementations [citation needed] simply halt execution of the program in question, usually with a segmentation fault. However, initializing pointers unnecessarily could hinder program analysis, thereby hiding bugs.
In C the use of any automatic variable before it has been initialized yields undefined behavior, as does integer division by zero, signed integer overflow, indexing an array outside of its defined bounds (see buffer overflow), or null pointer dereferencing. In general, any instance of undefined behavior leaves the abstract execution machine in ...
This can be understood as taking a null pointer of type structure st, and then obtaining the address of member m within said structure. While this implementation works correctly in many compilers, it has generated some debate regarding whether this is undefined behavior according to the C standard, [2] since it appears to involve a dereference of a null pointer (although, according to the ...
Dereferencing any of these variables could cause a segmentation fault: dereferencing the null pointer generally will cause a segfault, while reading from the wild pointer may instead result in random data but no segfault, and reading from the dangling pointer may result in valid data for a while, and then random data as it is overwritten.
It analyzes programs written in the programming languages C and C++, and emits an exhaustive list of possible runtime errors and assertion violations. The defect classes covered include divisions by zero , buffer overflows , dereferences of null or dangling pointers , data races , deadlocks , etc. Astrée includes a static taint checker and ...
Smart pointers are opaque data structures that act like pointers but can only be accessed through particular methods. A handle is an abstract reference, and may be represented in various ways. A common example are file handles (the FILE data structure in the C standard I/O library ), used to abstract file content.