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Top Forums Programming Segfaults on pointer deletion Post 302503058 by Corona688 on Wednesday 9th of March 2011 02:49:54 PM
Old 03-09-2011
Segfaults happen when you try to use memory areas you aren't assigned to. Nothing more, nothing less. That your program's crashing now, and not in Windows, may be because you didn't check the return value of a failed call and stored invalid values, or mangled a pointer because of integer size differences between Windows and AIX, or overran the end of an array and mangled your stack, or deleted something you never allocated and messed up your heap. On some platforms nothing happens; the function doesn't fail and the failing case never gets tested, or the integer sizes are just right to hold a pointer, you dump garbage on areas of the stack that don't matter, or the heap tolerates your misbehavior(for a time). But any change in circumstances, different compiler or different libraries or different architecture or different OS or different version, can bring out bugs that were waiting to happen. There's nothing magical or uniquely UNIX about it.

There's a few possibilities for what's causing your program to access invalid memory.
  1. Is the pointer you're deleting valid? Make sure you're deleting the same pointer you started with. The wrong pointer is just as bad as a NULL pointer.
  2. What does your destructor do? If it's deleting anything check that it's deleting what it started with too. delete doesn't care what's stored in it as long as the memory itself is valid, but the destructor might.
  3. Are you allocating with new and deleting with delete[], or vice versa? You have to match new[n] with delete[] and new with delete.
  4. Are you ever using arrays on the stack, or pointers to stack variables? Check you're not overrunning them.
  5. What are you deleting when? Some heap implementations don't do thorough checking, so deleting a bad pointer long ago can cause heap errors far later.

But I can't tell a single thing from your error message because you haven't posted all of your code. This could be a problem in far deeper or different code than you might think, and all these are just guesses.

Last edited by Corona688; 03-09-2011 at 03:57 PM..
 

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ATOMIC_DEC(3)						   BSD Library Functions Manual 					     ATOMIC_DEC(3)

NAME
atomic_dec, atomic_dec_32, atomic_dec_uint, atomic_dec_ulong, atomic_dec_ptr, atomic_dec_64, atomic_dec_32_nv, atomic_dec_uint_nv, atomic_dec_ulong_nv, atomic_dec_ptr_nv, atomic_dec_64_nv -- atomic decrement operations SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/atomic.h> void atomic_dec_32(volatile uint32_t *ptr); void atomic_dec_uint(volatile unsigned int *ptr); void atomic_dec_ulong(volatile unsigned long *ptr); void atomic_dec_ptr(volatile void *ptr); void atomic_dec_64(volatile uint64_t *ptr); uint32_t atomic_dec_32_nv(volatile uint32_t *ptr); unsigned int atomic_dec_uint_nv(volatile unsigned int *ptr); unsigned long atomic_dec_ulong_nv(volatile unsigned long *ptr); void * atomic_dec_ptr_nv(volatile void *ptr); uint64_t atomic_dec_64_nv(volatile uint64_t *ptr); DESCRIPTION
The atomic_dec family of functions decrement (by one) the variable referenced by ptr in an atomic fashion. The *_nv() variants of these functions return the new value. The 64-bit variants of these functions are available only on platforms that can support atomic 64-bit memory access. Applications can check for the availability of 64-bit atomic memory operations by testing if the pre-processor macro __HAVE_ATOMIC64_OPS is defined. SEE ALSO
atomic_ops(3) HISTORY
The atomic_dec functions first appeared in NetBSD 5.0. BSD
April 11, 2007 BSD
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