Daily Archives: May 31, 2005

Backtraces in glibc and Java

Posted on by
Reply
  • In Gnu libc:

The following program illustrates the use of these functions. Note that
the array to contain the return addresses returned by backtrace
is allocated on the stack. Therefore code like this can be used in
situations where the memory handling via malloc does not work
anymore (in which case the backtrace_symbols has to be replaced
by a backtrace_symbols_fd call as well). The number of return
addresses is normally not very large. Even complicated programs rather
seldom have a nesting level of more than, say, 50 and with 200 possible
entries probably all programs should be covered.

     #include <execinfo.h>
     #include <stdio.h>
     #include <stdlib.h>
    
     /* Obtain a backtrace and print it to stdout. */
     void
     print_trace (void)
     {
       void *array[10];
       size_t size;
       char **strings;
       size_t i;
    
       size = backtrace (array, 10);
       strings = backtrace_symbols (array, size);
    
       printf ("Obtained %zd stack frames.\n", size);
    
       for (i = 0; i < size; i++)
          printf ("%s\n", strings[i]);
    
       free (strings);
     }
    
     /* A dummy function to make the backtrace more interesting. */
     void
     dummy_function (void)
     {
       print_trace ();
     }
    
     int
     main (void)
     {
       dummy_function ();
       return 0;
     }

  • In Java:
StackTraceElement [] stack= Thread.currentThread ().getStackTrace ();

for (StackTraceElement e:stack) {

    ... ...

}

or in hotspot VM:

sun.reflect.Reflection.getCallerClass (1)