Segmentation fault handling

Question

I have an application which I use to catch any segmentation fault or ctrl-c. Using the below code, I am able to catch the segmentation fault but the handler is being called

Answer 1

You shouldn't try to continue after SIG_SEGV. It basically means that the environment of your application is corrupted in some way. It could be that you have just dereferenced a null pointer, or it could be that some bug has caused your program to corrupt its stack or the heap or some pointer variable, you just don't know. The only safe thing to do is terminate the program.

It's perfectly legitimate to handle control-C. Lots of applications do it, but you have to be really careful exactly what you do in your signal handler. You can't call any function that's not re-entrant. So that means if your MyFreeBuffers() calls the stdlib free() function, you are probably screwed. If the user hits control-C while the program is in the middle of malloc() or free() and thus half way through manipulating the data structures they use to track heap allocations, you will almost certainly corrupt the heap if you call malloc() or free() in the signal handler.

About the only safe thing you can do in a signal handler is set a flag to say you caught the signal. Your app can then poll the flag at intervals to decide if it needs to perform some action.