Big C codebase. To be more precise, they said it's C++, but as far as I could see, it was C compiled with g++.
Some code read xml data. Instead of choosing one of the xml-parsers available, author decided to write another one. Instead of using C++ features, atoi() used. For empty strings, atoi() got NULL and segfaulted. Signal 11 has been handled and suppressed in order to avoid crashes. Certainly, the code had other segmentation faults too, which could not been discovered this way. :)
Some code read xml data. Instead of choosing one of the xml-parsers available, author decided to write another one. Instead of using C++ features, atoi() used. For empty strings, atoi() got NULL and segfaulted. Signal 11 has been handled and suppressed in order to avoid crashes. Certainly, the code had other segmentation faults too, which could not been discovered this way. :)