What is the difference between a segmentation fault and a stack overflow?

Posted by AruniRC on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by AruniRC
Published on 2010-04-21T18:08:05Z Indexed on 2010/04/21 18:13 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 447

Filed under:

segmentation-fault

|

stackoverflow

|

stack

|

memory

|

c

For example when we call say, a recursive function, the successive calls are stored in the stack. However, due to an error if it goes on infinitely the error is 'Segmentation fault' (as seen on GCC).

Shouldn't it have been 'stack-overflow'? What then is the basic difference between the two?

Btw, an explanation would be more helpful than wikipedia links (gone through that, but no answer to specific query).

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about segmentation-fault

How to catch segmentation fault in Linux?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I need to catch segmentation fault in third party library cleanup operations. This happens sometimes just before my program exits, and I cannot fix the real reason of this. In Windows programming I could do this with __try - __catch. Is there cross-platform or platform-specific way to do the same… >>> More
gcc -fstack-check causes segmentation fault ?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have got a segmentation fault even with a "Hello World!" program sometimes. The interesting thing is that the segmentation fault not always shows up. Does there are some kind of famout bug on this flag? My gcc version is 4.1.1 with redhat 64bit. >>> More
Segmentation fault on the server, but not local machine

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
As stated in the title, the program is working on my local machine (ubuntu 9.10) but not on the server (linux). It's a grid hosting hosting package of godaddy. Please help.. Here is the code: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> int main(int argc, char **argv) { long offset; … >>> More
Segmentation Fault (C) occur on the server, but works on local machine

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
As stated in the title, the program is working on my local machine (ubuntu 9.10) but not on the server (linux). It's a grid hosting hosting package of godaddy. Please help.. Here is the code: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> int main(int argc, char **argv) { long offset; … >>> More
Why this generates segmentation fault?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
#include<stdio.h> void foo(int **arr) { arr[1][1]++; } main() { int arr[20][20]; printf("%d\n",arr[1][1]); foo((int**)arr); printf("%d\n",arr[1][1]); } >>> More

Related posts about stackoverflow

Logging into StackOverflow.com and Meta.StackOverflow.com

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have recently created a myopenid to log into stack overflow. This login works on stackoverflow.com but NOT on meta.stackoverflow.com. Why is this? This seems like it is a problem on (meta)stackoverflow's side rather than myopenid's side. When I attempt to login to meta.stackoverflow.com using… >>> More
Building a StackOverflow inspired Knowledge Exchange Three Tiers to MVC – Hooray – Dependency Inject

as seen on Dot net Slackers - Search for 'Dot net Slackers'
In this article we will address the lack of testability that our current application has. We will do this by making our application conform to the dependency injection pattern. This will allow us to push up all of our dependencies which makes our code considerably more testable than it currently is. >>> More
Building a StackOverflow inspired Knowledge Exchange Three Tiers to MVC – Distributed systems: addin

as seen on Dot net Slackers - Search for 'Dot net Slackers'
In this article we are going to look at how distributable our current code base is. We will find that even with all the refactoring and modifications that we have done we are still pretty married to a fairly hardwired infrastructure. If one piece of our code requires more resources than any other… >>> More
Building a StackOverflow inspired Knowledge Exchange Three Tiers to MVC – Hooray – Inversion of Cont

as seen on Dot net Slackers - Search for 'Dot net Slackers'
In this article we will discuss how we can enhance the power of the Dependency Injection pattern by implementing an Inversion of Control container. We will discuss what an IoC container can be used for and how it works. Then we will look at implementing an Inversion of Control container in our code… >>> More
Building a StackOverflow inspired Knowledge Exchange Three Tiers to MVC – Hooray – Reversing Depende

as seen on Dot net Slackers - Search for 'Dot net Slackers'
In this article we will focus on less of the structural issues and instead work on removing our dependency on LINQ to SQL. We will achieve this by employing an object to object mapping tool called AutoMapper. >>> More