Line number of segmentation fault

Question

Is there any gcc option I can set that will give me the line number of the segmentation fault?

I know I can:

1. Debug line by line
2. Put printfs in

Answer 1

You can get gcc to print you a stacktrace when your program gets a SEGV signal, similar to how Java and other friendlier languages handle null pointer exceptions. See my answer here for more details:

• how to generate a stacktace when my C++ app crashes ( using gcc compiler )

The nice thing about this is you can just leave it in your code; you don't need to run things through gdb to get the nice debug output.

If you compile with -g and follow the instructions there, you can use a command-line tool like addr2line to get file/line information from the output.