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The Shortest Crashing C Program

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Re: The Shortest Crashing C Program

#3

Post by AlexanderDhoore »

This reminds me of "A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux" [1]. The author tries to create the smallest possible elf executable possible. You would think it'd be easy... :) go read it. Very cool!

[1] http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.htm...

Re: The Shortest Crashing C Program

#5

Post by jstanley »

I'm not convinced this is a C89 program. It is only an "accident" that the linker doesn't know about types.

I find it hard to believe that the C89 spec states that an integer called "main" is to be considered the main function, and suspect this is undefined behaviour (though I've not checked).

Re: The Shortest Crashing C Program

#7

Post by femto »

It depends on the definition. You can do better than this if you define a valid C program as anything that passes though the C compiler and generates an executable. Behold the zero length program:

$ touch a.c

$ gcc -c a.c

$ ld a.o

ld: warning: cannot find entry symbol _start; defaulting to 0000000000400078

$ ./a.out

Segmentation fault

Re: The Shortest Crashing C Program

#10

Post by poizan42 »

jstanley wrote: post #5

I'm not convinced this is a C89 program. It is only an "accident" that the linker doesn't know about types. I find it hard to believe that the C89 spec states that an integer called "main" is to be considered the main function, and suspect this is undefined behaviour (though I've not checked).

It can't be a valid C89 program. On many Harvard architecture based microprocessors data pointers and code pointers have differing size.
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