I am writing a relatively simple C program in Visual C++, and have two global variables which I would like to know the values of as the program runs. The values don't change once they are assigned, but my programming ability is not enough to be able to quickly construct a text box that displays the values (I'm working in Win32) so am looking for a quick routine that can perhaps export the values to a text file so I can look at them and check they are what they ought to be. Values are 'double'.
I was under the impression that this was the purpose of the debugger, but for me the debugger doesn't run as the 'file not found' is always the case.
Any ideas how I can easily check the value of a global variable (double) in a Win32 app?
Get the debugger working. You should maybe post another question with information about why it won't work - with as much info as possible.
Once you have done that, set a breakpoint, and under Visual C++ (I just tried with 2010), hover over the variable name.
You could also use the watch window to enter expressions and track their values.
If your debugger isn't working try using printf statements wherever the program iterates.
Sometimes this can be a useful way of watching a variable without having to step into it.
If however you wish to run through the program in debug mode set a breakpoint as suggested (in VS2010 you can right click on the line you want to set a breakpoint on).
Then you just need to go to Toolbars -> Debug Toolbar.
I usually like to put #ifdef _DEBUG (or write an appropriate macro or even extra code) to do the printing, and send to the output everything that can help me tracking what the program's doing. Since your variables are never changing, I would do so.
However, flooding the console with lots of values is bad imo, and in such cases I would rely on assertions and the debugger - you should really see why it's not working.
I've done enough Python and Ruby to tell you that debugging a complex program when all you have is a printf, although doable, is extremely frustrating and takes way longer than what it should.
Finally, since you mention your data type is double (please make sure you have a good reason for not using floats instead), in case you add some assertion, remember that == is to be avoided unless you know 100% that == is what you really really want (which is unlikely if your data comes from calculations).
Related
I have a code base of almost 16000 lines of C code in which I am performing different operations (on a Raspberry Pi). After each operation, I am updating the value of dc. dc is initially 0 and if through some error my controller loses its connection with my laptop it becomes 1.
I need to call a function whenever it goes 1. I heard of a function in JavaScript called Object.prototype.watch() and unwatch(). Basically what it does is watches a variable and whenever its value changes, it calls a function. I need to implement a similar function or statement or anything that calls a function when my dc value changes.
I cannot use if-else after each update of dc because it is not a good way of coding and there are going to be a lot of if-else if I use it.
Nothing like this exists. Interpreted or managed languages have completely different rules. There is no other way than if.
You can wrap it into some kind of assertion or function but there is no other way than if in that wrapper
The sad answer is: No, there's no reliable way to watch a variable in C this way.
Depending on how the code works there are some workarounds.
One way is to hide (yes I know, it's hard to hide stuff completely in C) the variable. Define functions:
int noConnection() { return _noConnection; }
void lostConnection() { _noConnection = 1; myFunction(); }
Another way is to code some monitor that checks the variable at regular intervals. A drawback is if you really need this function to be run every time it changes, because it will not catch the event that a variable is changed and changed back between checks.
If the variable is not referenced by any pointers then you already know the places where it is updated, so you can use visibleman's method. There won't be a lot of if-elses like you anticipated. Just create a function like this
inline void update_dc(int new_dc) // or a macro if you want,
{ // but inline functions are more preferrable
#ifdef DEBUG_DC
if (new_dc == 1) // or if (new_dc != dc)
{
trap();
}
#endif
dc = new_dc;
}
and replace all assignments to dc with this function. You can do that easily with a regex in any text editors' find/replace command, or find/sed in the terminal
However in the general case when you don't know exactly at what point it can be updated, the easiest way is using a separate thread for watching it. You'll do some kind of polling by using a timer, or by checking the value and then sleep for some time to avoid wasting CPU usage. But you won't get the exact place where the change happens, unless you insert a value check after every instruction, which slows down your app many times.
You may also run a debugger like gdb and attach it to your own process to watch. It'll be a lot more flexible this way, but you'll need more memory. You can also try some debugging library if available
See Is is possible to set a gdb watchpoint programatically?
Many architectures do have hardware watch points, so debuggers will try to use them up before turning up to software watching (which is extremely slow). If you know about the architecture you can also set up the debug registers manually like that instead of running a full-fledged debugger. Of course most of the time you'll need to run in privileged mode to set those registers
On x86 there are 3 breakpoints stored in DR0-DR3 which will break on execution, data write, data read/write and IO read/write. I don't know the situation on ARM but it seems to have 6 hardware breakpoints. You can check those on ARM's documentation if you want to go that way.
The most straightforward solution seems to be to stop changing the variable directly and write a getter and setter function, that will call some callback.
I am using CLion in Windows. It has a stdout-like terminal that allows printf output to be shown. In some cases, however, I would like to have a static display that is updated. For example, I might have a matrix, and I want to see the values in the matrix update as the program runs. I do not want to print the matrix out to stdout because it would just scroll off the screen and be unreadable. I need the matrix to stay in one place and just update. In Unix I can do things like this with curses. Obviously I could start writing Windows graphical applications, but that would be complicated and time consuming. Is there any easy way to get an ASCII 2D display of information using CLion for Windows?
In CLion you may set breakpoints at appropriate positions (at the points where you'd like to see the values of the variables) and run the program in 'Debug' mode.
All the variables and their values at that point could be accessed in the variables tab and you may add them to your 'watch list' so that they can stand out from rest of the variables.
CLion has a pretty great debugger. You can even evaluate some statements using those variables.
For example :
I am starting to learn how to use ncurses right now, and I do some calculations based on the number of lines and columns when the program starts.
It would be too much work for me to do dynamic calculation to manage the display, so I would need to find a way to block the resize of the shell during the execution, is this possible ?
There is certainly no portable or general-purpose way of blocking display size changes. Specific terminal emulators might offer this feature, but I don't know of any which do. It is generally possible to create a window of fixed size, but the terminal emulator would have to do that; it is invisible to the console code running inside the terminal.
If you find it difficult to respond to dynamic display size changes, you probably need to restructure your code. Otherwise, you can just ignore the size change, which might result in a confusing experience for your users, or might just result in them seeing either a portion of the output or a lot of blank space, depending on the nature of the resizing. (To get the latter effect, you need to avoid relying on automatic line wrapping and scrolling. On the other hand, automatic wrapping and scrolling are often just what you need to make your application window-size-independent.)
So I've been stewing over this for a long time, thinking about it. Here's a code example first, and then I'll explain it.
:main
dostuff
otherlabel
:otherlabel
dostuff
Alright so in this example, main is where the code starts, and it 'calls' the label 'otherlabel'. This is really just a shortcut for a jump command that changes execution to a different location in memory. My problem though is, how do I handle these labels so that they don't have to be declared before they are called?
At the moment, I'm doing a single step compilation reading straight from the source and outputting the bytecode. I am simply handling labels and adding them to a dictionary when I find them. And then I replace 'otherlabel' with a jump command to the correct location in code. But in this case that code wouldn't compile.
I've thought of a few ways to do this:
First is handling labels before anything else but this requires me to do everything in two steps and I have to deal with the same code twice, this slows down the process and just seems like a mess.
Second is queueing up the label calls until AFTER I've gone through the entire file and compiled everything else and then dealing with them, this seems much cleaner.
I'm writing this in C so I'd rather not implement complex data structures, I'm looking for the most straight forward way to handle this.
Use multiple passes. One pass isn't going to suffice for a scripting language, especially when you are getting to the more complex structures.
In a first pass, before compiling, construct your dictionary of labels.
In a later pass, when the compiling happens, just use that dictionary.
You could use "backpatching", although it sounds like that's what you've tried already; and it could be consstrued as a complex structure.
When you encounter a call to an undefined label, you emit the jump with a blank address field (probably into a buffer, otherwise this becomes the same as "multipass" if you have to re-read the file to patch it); and you also store a pointer to the blank field in a "patch-up" list in the dictionary. When you encounter the label definition, you fill-in all the blanks in the list, and proceed normally.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I had my code working earlier in the day on the unix machine, but when compiled under windows it gave me completely strange and incorrect output.
Since our code is going to be marked based on compilation on unix I thought hey that's good enough. But now I just finished refactoring my code (basically just adding comments, getting rid of variables which were never used in the program and getting rid of some functions which I wrote to test the program) and now suddenly my code seems to be giving me the proper output on windows and wrong output on unix.
Note that I have done nothing to modify the functionality of the code.
After spending so many hours working on this banging my head against Seg Fault errors through the week, this last minute bug is going to put it all to waste. What am I supposed to do when the bug is seemingly appearing at random?
Edit: The program is supposed to read a file similar to an html file and print out the tables. I'm loading the data of each individual cell onto a node in a Linked List and then printing out the info based on an algorithm. The output is working fine on windows now but not on unix. I don't even know what part of the code I need to look since I have no idea what's causing this.
Based on the amount of information you supplied (next to none), the best guess is to look for uninitialized variables. That will produce different output on different platforms, and is a common beginner mistake in C.
I suggest you use gdb to debug your code and check where the segmentation fault is arising. That will give you a good hint of were to start looking, even though you don't remember to have done any modification.
There is plenty documentation on the web.
These are the basics:
shell> gdb myprogram
gdb> backtrace #lists the steps until the segmentation fault arises
gdb> select 2 #You can select any step you want (e.g. 2)
gdb> print number #print variables to hack around
There are a lot of features for gdb. I think this will give you a hint quickly.
Don't forget to use a version control system the next time. It's a safe and nice way of having your code organized and clean, and off course!, to avoid these terrible accidents.
(SVN or GIT are cool enough)
Step 1, make a copy of everything.
Copy the entire project somewhere. Make a note of what state the project was in when you made that copy and the date:time. DO NOT edit that copy. You may even make the files unwritable if you want. You need to be able to see what you have changed as well as go back to it. Even though the program does not currently work on Unix, it does work under Windows, so you know that it does have some merit and is close to being useful to turn in. When I get upset at a program I am writing or at the compiler for not understanding it (this happens a lot less now then it did 10 years ago) I tend to lose track of what all I am changing, so changing it back becomes difficult. Using some type of version control (even just keeping extra copies around) will help you to keep track of what you have changes so when you make a mistake you can unmake that mistake pretty easily. Differencing tools, like diff are very helpful when you know how to use them. For right now you might want to try:
diff --minimal --side-by-side --ignore-all-space old_file.c new_file.c | less
Hopefully you are using a diff that supports those options because I think that they may be the most helpful for you in the short time that you have. If you find that you need to fit more on the screen and your terminal window is large you can also add in the --width= command and give it a number of characters in a line on your terminal.
Anyway, make and keep lots of copies of your code until you know that you won't need them anymore (and maybe even then).
If you have graphical access see if kdiff3 is available. It may be easier for you to use quickly. The 3 in its name refers to the ability to compare 3 versions of a file at one time (a common starting point and two edited versions of that file) and is useful, but you can learn about that later. It is perfectly able to compare just two versions of a file and produce decent output.
Step 2 Don't ignore warnings
I suggest that you compile it with the highest warning level possible with your compiler and DO NOT ignore any warnings. If you already have warnings without telling the compiler to issue more warnings then examine those first. Warnings are there for a reason, and only occasionally should you ever encounter code the produces warnings that should just be ignored (and even then I usually add a comment about the expected type of warning and why it is not an error). With gcc you can add the -Wall option to the compile command to issue all warnings.
gcc -Wall my_program.c -o my_program
Some may not make sense to you, but you can at least look at the code and see what might be unclear about it in the vicinity of the warning line.
step 3 Use simple lines of code
Something that will make warnings easier to understand is using very simple to understand lines of code. Trying to fit too much functionality into one line of code makes it so that any warning or error message about that line of code is much more difficult to understand.
step 4 Use temporary variables
Temporary variables don't necessarily mean "my program uses more memory" but they do often mean the compiler gives more meaningful warnings because the data-types of variables in expressions are much clearer.
step 5 Use functions
This is just a continuation of the philosophy from 3 and 4. Functions make things easier to understand. They also make it so that often when you find an error and fix it you don't have to worry about having copies of the erroneous code elsewhere in the program that also needs to be fixed (though you should still search for similar code just to be sure).
step 6 assert
There is a macro (like a function, but not quite) called assert that lives in #include <assert.h> and can help you find all kinds of errors by making your program fail earlier than it otherwise would. This sounds bad, but very often (especially with memory related problems like segmentation faults (SIGSEGV) ) programs are in a fatal state well before they die. Using assert helps you to move their death to an earlier place so that you can see what their fatal mistake was, rather than just seeing the result of it.
assert takes as its parameter a boolean expression -- any comparison, integer, floating point number, or pointer will do. Anything that you could use as a condition in an if or while will do. If this expression is false (0 or NULL) then your program will die right there and on many systems it will give you a helpful error message about where the assertion that killed the program was located and maybe even what the assertion was. There is another helpful thing that this causes which I'll talk about in a little bit, but for now, to use assert you just do:
assert(x < y);
and if x is not less than y the program will abort (actually call the abort function).
This is helpful for things like:
int clear_buffer(char * buffer, unsigned len)
{ /* len should be size_t but I don't want to explain that right now */
assert(buffer);
memset(buffer, 0, len);
}
Step 7, Use a debugger
If you have gdb on your Unix system then GREAT. If not, you probably have some other debugger than you can learn how to use. Many Unix C compilers take the -g option to mean "include debugging symbols", so add that to the other options you are passing to the compiler and recompile your program, and then do:
gdb ./myprogram
Which will print some stuff and then prompt you with:
(gdb)
Then you can set break points and all kinds of good stuff, but since you are in a hurry and getting crashes just do:
(gdb) r
Include any arguments after the r that you would be passing to your program when you normally ran it. gdb will then run your program until something odd happens. The something odd, in this case, should be a SIGSEGV (what UNIXes do to your program when it tries to access memory addresses that it shouldn't). gdb will then prompt you with (gdb) again. You can then do:
(gdb) bt
bt stands for back trace and gdb will print out the call stack, meaning all functions that were called to get to the current function. You should see main near the bottom. Look for the first function near the top that is a function you wrote. This is where you need to start trying to find errors. If the top function on the list is not one of yours then try issuing:
(gdb) up
Which will make it examine the previous function on the call stack. Once in one of your functions say:
(gdb) list
And it will show you some code around the area where things are wrong.
To exit gdb you do:
(gdb) quit
And answer Y if it ask you if you really want to quit.
If you were to use assert and that killed your program then you would not end up with quite as much library stuff on top of the call stack to confuse you.
Sadly 3, 4, and 5 mess up the ability to get good info from diff so I suggest trying to limit your adding of this programming style into places where you are having errors or warnings already (at least for now).
I hope that this helps
First of all, we will need your code to see what's going on. But if what you described is true then it is most likely that your code contains what's called undefined behavior. Undefined behavior can occur due to too many reasons, such as crossing array boundaries, incorrectly deleting pointers etc.etc. So, without code nothing can be said
Run it through valgrind.
I can guarantee you will find your error with valgrind.
If you've got access to a unix or linux machine, you should never release code that you haven't run through valgrind, even if the code works.
With the data you've provided, here is my solution.
Take a break and zone out of the problem domain for a while.
Use a debugger, step through the program, identify where it is segfaulting.
Print data at the point of the segfault and validate it.
That should solve the problem.
Compile your code with all warnings on.
Don't hide warnings with bogus casts, but take them seriously and resolve the real problems.
Use different compilers. On linux clang is a good alternative and gives way more indications than gcc.