LKBEN11145: Howto create a stack overflow on purpose in C/C++

Symptom

You want to produce a stack overflow to learn to know your system better

Cause

none

Solution

There are quite some possibilities to create a stack overflow and it just takes a second to reach it.

Stack overflow can be done with
1. Infinite recursion with functions
2. very large stack variables
3. through exhausting other shared memory e.g. (windows Desktop Heap Size) can lead to stack overflow errors!

Infinite recursion can be programmed like:

 void a() {
   a();
 }
 int main() {
   a();
   return 0;
 }


or like

 void f(void);
 void g(void);
 
 int main(void) {
   f();
 
   return 0;
 }
 
 void f(void) {
   g();
 }
 
 void g(void) {
   f();  
 }


Excessively large stack variables can be done with:

 int main(void) {
   double n[10000000];
   return 0;
 }

Disclaimer:

About the Author

Author: Wim Peeters - Keskon GmbH & Co. KG

Wim Peeters is electronics engineer with an additional master in IT and over 30 years of experience, including time spent in support, development, consulting, training and database administration. Wim has worked with SQL Server since version 6.5. He has developed in C/C++, Java and C# on Windows and Linux. He writes knowledge base articles to solve IT problems and publishes them on the Lubby Knowledge Platform.