What is the simplest standard conform way to produce a Segfault in C?
A segmentation fault is an implementation defined behavior. The standard does not define how the implementation should deal with undefined behavior and in fact the implementation could optimize out undefined behavior and still be compliant. To be clear, implementation defined behavior is behavior which is not specified by the standard but the implementation should document. Undefined behavior is code that is non-portable or erroneous and whose behavior is unpredictable and therefore can not be relied on.
If we look at the C99 draft standard §3.4.3 undefined behavior which comes under the Terms, definitions and symbols section in paragraph 1 it says (emphasis mine going forward):
behavior, upon use of a nonportable or erroneous program construct or of erroneous data, for which this International Standard imposes no requirements
and in paragraph 2 says:
NOTE Possible undefined behavior ranges from ignoring the situation completely with unpredictable results, to behaving during translation or program execution in a documented manner characteristic of the environment (with or without the issuance of a diagnostic message), to terminating a translation or execution (with the issuance of a diagnostic message).
If, on the other hand, you simply want a method defined in the standard that will cause a segmentation fault on most Unix-like systems then raise(SIGSEGV) should accomplish that goal. Although, strictly speaking, SIGSEGV is defined as follows:
SIGSEGV an invalid access to storage
and §7.14 Signal handling <signal.h> says:
An implementation need not generate any of these signals, except as a result of explicit calls to the raise function. Additional signals and pointers to undeclarable functions, with macro definitions beginning, respectively, with the letters SIG and an uppercase letter or with SIG_ and an uppercase letter,219) may also be specified by the implementation. The complete set of signals, their semantics, and their default handling is implementation-defined; all signal numbers shall be positive.
The standard only mentions undefined behavior. It knows nothing about memory segmentation. Also note that the code that produces the error is not standard-conformant. Your code cannot invoke undefined behavior and be standard conformant at the same time.
Nonetheless, the shortest way to produce a segmentation fault on architectures that do generate such faults would be:
int main(){ *(int*)0 = 0;}Why is this sure to produce a segfault? Because access to memory address 0 is always trapped by the system; it can never be a valid access (at least not by userspace code.)
Note of course that not all architectures work the same way. On some of them, the above could not crash at all, but rather produce other kinds of errors. Or the statement could be perfectly fine, even, and memory location 0 is accessible just fine. Which is one of the reasons why the standard doesn't actually define what happens.