DeathHandler C++03+ class installs SEGFAULT, SIGABRT and SIGFPE signal handlers to print a nice stack trace and (if requested) generate a core dump. In DeathHandler's constructor, signal handlers are installed through sigaction(). If your program encounters a segmentation fault, the call stack is unwinded with backtrace(), converted into function names with line numbers via addr2line (fork() + execlp()). Addresses from shared libraries are also converted thanks to dladdr(). All C++ symbols are demangled. Printed stack trace includes the faulty thread id obtained with pthread_self() and each line contains the process id to distinguish several stack traces printed by different processes at the same time.

The code works primarily on Linux and tested on x86_64 and ARM with glibc. Besides, there is a partial support of MacOSX (addr2line -> atos is not implemented).

Since backtrace() uses malloc() and the heap my be corrupted by the time it is called, malloc() and free() have to be overridden. On Linux, it is done via a simple symbol overload; on MacOSX, malloc_default_zone() approach is taken because overloading does not work out of the box.

Example

test.cc:

#include "death_handler.h"

int main() {
  Debug::DeathHandler dh;
  int* p = NULL;
  *p = 0;
  return 0;
}

g++ -g death_handler.cc test.cc -ldl -o test
./test

vmarkovtsev/DeathHandler

Example