Thread: quick question

  1. #1
    Registered User moi's Avatar
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    Jul 2002
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    quick question

    just dug a program out of the grave. wrote it some time ago. i remember that it would run fine on my machine (dos proggie in w98 dos box) but other people reported crashes. so i dug it out of my archives today and scanned through it, spotted this:

    Code:
    /* snip */
    int main (void)
    {
      char *filenom;
      int i;
      /* snip */
      sprintf (filenom, "samp%3i.wav", i + 1);
      /*snip */
    }
    /* snip */
    assuming that i is initialized correctly, would this cause a problem because i havent allocated any space for filenom?? i'm not the greatest with C or pointers but i think that's it.....

  2. #2
    Registered User The Dog's Avatar
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    yes

  3. #3
    Just because ygfperson's Avatar
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    ditto.

  4. #4
    Registered User moi's Avatar
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    thanks!

    i replaced it with

    Code:
    char filenom[12];

  5. #5
    Code Goddess Prelude's Avatar
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    >would this cause a problem because i havent allocated any space for filenom??
    Yes, because you are trying to assign data to memory that you don't own (ie. the random value that filenom starts with since it is local and uninitialized). In such a case you should either assign memory to filenom with malloc, calloc, or realloc, or just use a static array. Though static arrays will limit the flexibility of your program.

    To avoid the little crashing problem, initialize your pointers to NULL so that you will always get a run-time error when you try to assign to it. This tips you off that something not good is happening and you can fix it before distributing the program.

    -Prelude
    My best code is written with the delete key.

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