On Wed, 10 Apr 1996, Hades wrote:
> My mud now keeps crashing, no doubt to the new code I;ve imped, but gdb says
> it is crashing here in handler.c:
>
> void obj_to_char(struct obj_data *object, struct char_data *ch)
> {
> if (object && ch) {
> object->next_content = ch->carrying; <- HERE! HOW?
> ch->carrying = object;
> object->carried_by = ch;
>
> How can it crash at that line? The if statement right before it checks to
> see if object & ch != NULL. How can that crash it? Might I have some
> funky-ass memory leak?
Well, I've noticed that on some (stupid) gcc's, the program will try to
continue operation after a memory error that should really cause a
crash. The idea behind this, I guess, is to skip past all of the NULL
pointer references that are technically illegal but don't usually cause a
big problem. The difficulty is that sometimes all it takes is a
reference to a memory pointer after a while to cause a crash which is
then almost totally unidentifiable. In tracking down these problems,
I've found the bounds-checking library to be of immense use. It means
that it'll crash CircleMUD every other line of code, but damn it if you
won't have clean code three years later, when you've fixed all the bugs!
The problem with this is that if your machine hasn't got bounds checking
already, you have to download the sources for gcc and recompile them,
which takes 60mb of disk space and superuser access unless you know
something I don't. But you can try. Look for a library called bounds.a
to see if you've at least got the linkable library. If you do, recompile
all of CircleMUD using -fbounds-checking and turn off all the
optimizations. Crank up debugging the whole way.
You'll have to cope with the bounds-checking copyright at the startup of
CircleMUD, but you can get rid of that once you've spotted all the
areas. Also, bounds should catch any bugs the first time around, rather
than every 5 hours or so.
________________________________________________________________________
Tel Janin Aellinsar http://www.crocker.com/~icarus
McCoy Enterprises Corporation Shayol Ghul Resort and Health Spa
Berserker Dragon, Knights of the Cosmos icarus@BERKSHIRE.NET
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