Re: [PLUG] [C QUESTION] how to tell caller of a function

[Kevin Brosius <kbrosius@kns.com>]

Fred K Ollinger wrote:
> 
> In C, how may a C function determine which function called it?
> 
> If I have a function called by lots of other function and there's an
> error, I might want to know where the call came from so I can trace it
> back.
> 
> Fred Ollinger (follinge@sas.upenn.edu)
> CCN sysadmin
> 

Lot's of people mentioned a debugger (like gdb, or the easier to use
wrapper ddd), but if you're new to programming a debugger has a learning
curve to it also.

You can easily add printf() functions inside the code which print out
the function name, or variables inside the program.  Doing this for the
function you are worried about, along with a few of the places it is
called, will give you a printout of the program flow the next time you
run the program.

If there are a lot of these calls, you'll want to log the output to a
file and review it after you run the program.

A debugger generally gives more flexibility, but requires you build the
program with debugging symbols if you want the full ability to trace
through it.  Both methods have their places of use.

-- 
Kevin Brosius
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