Advanced Mac OS X Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

Handy Tricks

Sometimes you are running, and you get an error like this:

a​.​o​u​t​(​1​1​2​3​3​)​ ​m​a​l​l​o​c​:​ ​*​*​*​ ​e​r​r​o​r​ ​f​o​r​ ​o​b​j​e​c​t​ ​0​x​1​0​0​1​2​0​:​ ​d​o​u​b​l​e​ ​f​r​e​e​
*​*​*​ ​s​e​t​ ​a​ ​b​r​e​a​k​p​o​i​n​t​ ​i​n​ ​m​a​l​l​o​c​_​e​r​r​o​r​_​b​r​e​a​k​ ​t​o​ ​d​e​b​u​g​

Usually by the time you can react, your program has moved far past that. As suggested, you can set a breakpoint on malloc_error_break to catch the offending free().

Another even more common occurrence in Cocoa programming is this error:

2​0​1​0​-​0​1​-​2​0​ ​2​0​:​0​3​:​3​8​.​0​8​0​ ​b​a​d​m​e​s​s​a​g​e​[​1​1​3​0​3​:​1​0​b​]​ ​*​*​*​ ​-​[​N​S​C​F​A​r​r​a​y​ ​ ​ ​ ​f​r​o​b​u​l​a​t​e​:​]​:​ ​u​n​r​e​c​o​g​n​i​z​e​d​ ​s​e​l​e​c​t​o​r​ ​s​e​n​t​ ​t​o​ ...