How to end up with a pointer to 0xCCCCCCCC

Question

The program I\'m working on crashes sometimes trying to read data at the address 0xCCCCCCCC. Google (and StackOverflow) being my friends I saw that it\'s the MS

Answer 1

How about this? Ignore the warning that VC throws while running.

struct A{
    int *p;
};

int main(){
    A a;
    cout << (void *)a.p;
}

Answer 2

int main()
{
    int* p;
}

If you build with the Visual C++ debug runtime, put a breakpoint in main(), and run, you will see that p has a value of 0xcccccccc.

Answer 3

I do not have MSVC, but this code should produce the problem and compile with no warnings.

In file f1.c:

void ignore(int **p) { }

In file f2.c:

void ignore(int **p);
int main(int c, char **v)
{
  int *a;
  ignore(&a);
  return *a;
}

The call to ignore makes it look like a might be initialized. I doubt the compiler will warn in this case, because of the risk that the warning might be a false positive.

Answer 4

Compile your code with the /GZ compiler switch or /RTCs switch. Make sure that /Od switch is also used to disable any optimizations.

s

Enables stack frame run-time error checking, as follows:

• Initialization of local variables to a nonzero value. This helps identify bugs that do not appear when running in debug mode. There is a greater chance that stack variables will still be zero in a debug build compared to a release build because of compiler optimizations of stack variables in a release build. Once a program has used an area of its stack, it is never reset to 0 by the compiler. Therefore, subsequent, uninitialized stack variables that happen to use the same stack area can return values left over from the prior use of this stack memory.

• Detection of overruns and underruns of local variables such as arrays. /RTCs will not detect overruns when accessing memory that results from compiler padding within a structure. Padding could occur by using align (C++), /Zp (Struct Member Alignment), or pack, or if you order structure elements in such a way as to require the compiler to add padding.

• Stack pointer verification, which detects stack pointer corruption. Stack pointer corruption can be caused by a calling convention mismatch. For example, using a function pointer, you call a function in a DLL that is exported as __stdcall but you declare the pointer to the function as __cdecl.