Native code - how to get function call stack (backtrace) programmatically

Question

I have C++ codebase running on Android, and want to have crash reports sent by users.

I\'m using ACRA library which works fine for Java code, but when something crashes

Answer 1

I have done this in my game base project - you can see the JNI code which handles this here:

https://bitbucket.org/xg/android-game-base/src/c0d969d44a55/jni/NativeActivityJNI.cpp#cl-40

which calls the Java method defined here:

https://bitbucket.org/xg/android-game-base/src/c0d969d44a55/src/com/gmail/whittock/tom/Util/NativeActivity.java#cl-91

The overall solution is based on handling signals, then in the signal handler firing a call up to java to dump the stack trace etc, in my code I start another activity to get the logcat information and email it to me.

Answer 2

ACRA can trap the application crashing. You could then instantiate a second process that would execute the logcat ( see this question ) command, filtering by your application name, and then have the process to send the dumped file to you. This is far from optimal because:

• The Application that would span logcat has to have the WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE and READ_LOGS permissions
• Probably the user would be annoyed to having to install a new program

But I didn't found another alternative to do this.