Seg fault while parsing a line into ***char - c

Question

My code is supposed to parse an array of chars into ***char, so that it splits it first by '|' char and then by whitespaces, newline characters etc into words. Sample i/o:
I = ls -l | sort | unique
O =
*cmds[1] = {"ls", "-l", NULL};
*cmds[2] = {"sort", NULL};
*cmds[3] = {"unique", NULL};
above are pointers to char arrays, so split by words and then below is ***char with pointers to above pointers
char **cmds[] = {1, 2, 3, NULL};
Now, I don't see my mistake (probably because I am not so skilled in C), but program gives segfault the second I call parse(..) function from inside parsePipe(). Can anyone please help?
void parse(char *line, char **argv)
{
while (*line != '\0') {
while (*line == ' ' || *line == '\t' || *line == '\n')
*line++ = '\0';
*argv++ = line;
while (*line != '\0' && *line != ' ' && *line != '\t' && *line != '\n'){
line++;
}
}
*argv = '\0';
}
void parsePipe(char *line, char ***cmds)
{
char *cmd = strtok(line, "|");
int word_counter = 0;
while (cmd != NULL)
{
printf("Printing word -> %s\n", cmd);
word_counter++;
parse(cmd, *cmds++);
cmd = strtok(NULL, "|");
}
printf("This string contains %d words separated with |\n",word_counter);
}
void main(void)
{
char line[1024];
char **cmds[64];
while (1) {
printf("lsh -> ");
gets(line);
printf("\n");
parsePipe(line, cmds);
}
}

Answer 1

[too long for a comment]
This line
*argv++ = line; /* with char ** argv */
refers to invalid memory, as the code does *argv[n] (with char **argv[64]) which refers nothing.
The namings you use do not make live easier.
Try the following naming:
void parse(char *line, char **cmd)
{
while (*line != '\0') {
while (*line == ' ' || *line == '\t' || *line == '\n')
*line++ = '\0';
*cmd++ = line;
while (*line != '\0' && *line != ' ' && *line != '\t' && *line != '\n'){
line++;
}
}
*argv = '\0';
}
void parsePipe(char *line, char ***cmdline)
{
char *cmd = strtok(line, "|");
int word_counter = 0;
while (cmd != NULL)
{
printf("Printing word -> %s\n", cmd);
word_counter++;
parse(cmd, *cmdline++);
cmd = strtok(NULL, "|");
}
printf("This string contains %d words separated with |\n",word_counter);
}
void main(void)
{
char line[1024];
char **cmdline[64];
while (1) {
printf("lsh -> ");
gets(line);
printf("\n");
parsePipe(line, cmdline);
}
}
For none of the cmds used memory had been allocated.
So
*cmd++ = line;
fails, as cmd points nowhere, but gets dereferenced and the code tries to write to where it's pointing, which is nowhere, that is invalid memory.
Fixing this can be done by passing char*** to parse(char *** pcmd) and counting the tokens found
size_t nlines = 0;
...
++nlines.
and the doing a
*pcmd = realloc(*pcmd, nlines + 1); /* Allocate one more as needed to later find the end of the array. */
(*pcmd)[nlines -1] = line;
(*pcmd)[nlines] = NULL; /* Initialise the stopper, marking the end of the array. */
for each token found.
Obviously you need to call it like this:
parse(cmd, cmdline++);
To have all this work the inital array needs to initialised properly (as you should have done anyway):
char **cmdline[64] = {0};