You know the situation. The program is prepared for debugging and in
all debugging sessions it runs well. But once it is started without
debugging the error shows up. A typical example is a memory leak that
becomes visible only when we turn off the debugging. If you foresee
such situations you can still win. Simply use something equivalent to
the following little program:
#include <mcheck.h>
#include <signal.h>
static void
enable (int sig)
{
mtrace ();
signal (SIGUSR1, enable);
}
static void
disable (int sig)
{
muntrace ();
signal (SIGUSR2, disable);
}
int
main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
...
signal (SIGUSR1, enable);
signal (SIGUSR2, disable);
...
}
I.e., the user can start the memory debugger any time s/he wants if the
program was started with MALLOC_TRACE set in the environment.
The output will of course not show the allocations which happened before
the first signal but if there is a memory leak this will show up
nevertheless.
Published under the terms of the GNU General Public License