List of Common Reasons for Segmentation Faults in C/C++

The main reason for segmentation fault is accessing memory that is either not initialized, out of bounds for your program or trying to modify string literals. These may cause a segmentation fault though it is not guaranteed that they will cause a segmentation fault. Here are some of the common reasons for segmentation faults:

1. Accessing an array out of bounds
2. Dereferencing NULL pointers
3. Dereferencing freed memory
4. Dereferencing uninitialized pointers
5. Incorrect use of the "&" (address of) and "*" (dereferencing) operators
6. Improper formatting specifiers in printf and scanf statements
7. Stack overflow
8. Writing to read-only memory

Ramu Prasad

Published on 28-Feb-2018 11:31:06