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<h5 class="subsubsection">3.2.3.3 Some more or less clever ideas</h5>
<p>You know the situation. The program is prepared for debugging and in
all debugging sessions it runs well. But once it is started without
debugging the error shows up. A typical example is a memory leak that
becomes visible only when we turn off the debugging. If you foresee
such situations you can still win. Simply use something equivalent to
the following little program:
<pre class="example"> #include &lt;mcheck.h&gt;
#include &lt;signal.h&gt;
static void
enable (int sig)
{
mtrace ();
signal (SIGUSR1, enable);
}
static void
disable (int sig)
{
muntrace ();
signal (SIGUSR2, disable);
}
int
main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
...
signal (SIGUSR1, enable);
signal (SIGUSR2, disable);
...
}
</pre>
<p>I.e., the user can start the memory debugger any time s/he wants if the
program was started with <code>MALLOC_TRACE</code> set in the environment.
The output will of course not show the allocations which happened before
the first signal but if there is a memory leak this will show up
nevertheless.
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