It's terrible. Taarrrribbble. First I didn't research the math, thinking: Oh, that is _easy_! Then one simple hack led to another quick hack (with a bit of faerydust sprinkled) and let's just say I got the correct solution the first time I checked, because I lucked out, not because I wrote a good algorithm.
Valgrind was happy with it. I'm not. After posting the code, I realised that *somehow* I crammed nearly 1000 chars into a string I malloc(500)'ed.
The question is: Why did it work? The next question is: would it work on another computer? And most important of all: should it have worked in the first place? Plus, other than eye balling the code and seeing the obvious problem, is there a way to check?
True, you could say that it's not a bug as such, because it does what I intended, but... the issue that I have, is if that isn't picked up with a nice helpful (and popular!) SIGSEV, what else is as dodgy and wrong?
Adding -fstack-protector-all didn't help to find a indication of an error either.
After some surfing, I found that dmesg (and readelf -s) is my friend, and, lo and behold:
(...)
[12556151.546186] project2-exe[18950]: segfault at 7fff5a18ae00 ip 00007fd452916744 sp 00007fffaddf9338 error 4 in libc-2.19.so[7fd45288d000+1bb000]
[12564217.667780] traps: project2-exe[19250] general protection ip:7f94a50ad7cd sp:7fff01927b90 error:0 in libc-2.19.so[7f94a5072000+1bb000]
(...)
Luckily I knew where the problem was, or so I thought. But, alas, this was a previous SIGSEV which I had fixed[1] and there was nothing that readelf had to tell me. After some more coffee, I finally had the bright idea that perhaps those allocations were just not used, and I checked the man pages for strndup() and strstr() and... yep, that was the non-problem.
[1] One good reason to use the emacs shell instead of M-x compile: search upwards is trivial and you find out some things that otherwise would have confuzzled you for yonks.
