14.7 Dereferencing Null or Invalid Pointers

Trying to dereference a null pointer is an error. On most platforms, it generally causes a signal, usually SIGSEGV (see Signals).

char *foo = NULL;
c = *foo;    /* This causes a signal and terminates.  */

Likewise a pointer that has the wrong alignment for the target data type (on most types of computer), or points to a part of memory that has not been allocated in the process’s address space.

The signal terminates the program, unless the program has arranged to handle the signal (see The GNU C Library in The GNU C Library Reference Manual).

However, the signal might not happen if the dereference is optimized away. In the example above, if you don’t subsequently use the value of c, GCC might optimize away the code for *foo. You can prevent such optimization using the volatile qualifier, as shown here:

volatile char *p;
volatile char c;
c = *p;

You can use this to test whether p points to unallocated memory. Set up a signal handler first, so the signal won’t terminate the program.