What is segmentation fault in ruby

Ruby
1

when am using ruby1.8.7 Patch-level 174 am get segmentation fault in my
application can any one explain me what is segmentation fault and how it
can be resolved.

Regards
Udhaya Kumar.D

2

Udhaya Kumar wrote in post #1007362:

when am using ruby1.8.7 Patch-level 174 am get segmentation fault in my
application can any one explain me what is segmentation fault and how it
can be resolved.

It’s a machine-code level bug, either in ruby itself, or in the compiler
you used to build ruby, or in one of the C extensions you’re using with
ruby.

So:

  • what OS are you on?
  • where did you get ruby from? a package? built yourself? (if so how,
    with what flags?)
  • what C extensions are you using? (this includes gems which report
    “native extensions” when they are installing)
  • what does your ruby application do when the bug is triggered?
  • can you get a backtrace? To do this, run ruby under gdb, and then do
    whatever you do to make it crash.

$ gdb ruby
…
(gdb) run [args]

[when it crashes]
(gdb) bt

That is, if you’d do
ruby myscript.rb
then instead do
gdb ruby
run myscript.rb

That info should help narrow down the problem. You’re using a pretty
robust version of ruby, so it’s unlikely to be a bug in ruby itself, but
it is possible.

3

From Wikipedia:

“Generally, segmentation faults occur because: a pointer is either NULL,
points to random memory (probably never initialized to anything), or
points to memory that has been freed/deallocated/“deleted”.”

Some element of your system is doing something the author didn’t expect
to happen.