Segment violation from malloc (what does it mean?)

[Henry Spencer]

In article <1063 at brchh104.bnr.ca> fredc at umrisca.isc.umr.edu writes:
>I have been working on a big SunView program for a while now, and, after
>adding some [more] dynamically allocated data structures which endure for
>the entire program, dbxtool gave me the following message:
>
>signal SEGV (no mapping at the fault address) in malloc at 0xec52864

A segmentation violation in malloc almost invariably means that you have
corrupted its data structures.  Ways of doing this include, depending on
circumstances and system variant:  freeing something that was not
malloced, freeing NULL, freeing something twice, writing past the end (or
beginning) of a malloced area, writing into an area that was malloced but
has been freed, and writing into memory at random (typically due to
garbaged pointers or grossly out-of-bounds array subscripts).

>What I want to know is: does this message mean I am running into a limit
>on my dynamic storage space? ...

Almost certainly not.  That should just give you a NULL return value.  A
program bug is much more likely.

If the Space Shuttle was the answer,   | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
what was the question?                 |  henry at zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry