Simple debugging output in C

bp@barryp.org (Barry Pederson) — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 18:35:29 -0700

I don't do a whole lot of C programming, but when I do it tends to be in difficult environments like Apache modules or Samba VFS modules, where you can't just do simple printfs to get some output from your program.

I've come up with this small chunk of code I can plop in a C file to allow for optionally writing out useful information to a file somewhere on the disk.

#ifdef DEBUG_FILENAME
    #include 
    #include 
    #include 
    #define QUOTE(name) #name
    #define STR(macro) QUOTE(macro)

    static void debug_log(const char *msg, ...) {
        char timestamp[32]; // really only need 21 bytes here
        time_t now;
        va_list ap;
        FILE *f;

        now = time(NULL);
        strftime(timestamp, sizeof(timestamp), "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S ", localtime(&now));

        f = fopen(STR(DEBUG_FILENAME), "a");

        fputs(timestamp, f);

        va_start(ap, msg);
        vfprintf(f, msg, ap);
        va_end(ap);

        fputc('\n', f);
        fclose(f);
    }
#else
    #define debug_log
#endif

Within your program, you'd just sprinkle in calls to debug_log() with a format string and optional arguments, such as:

x = 5;
y = 10;
debug_log("Currently, x=%d, y=%d", x, y);

The code can then be enabled and configured to output to /tmp/foo.log (for example), by adding either

#define DEBUG_FILENAME /tmp/foo.log

to the top of your source file, or even more slickly for some things, from the commandline with

cc -DDEBUG_FILENAME=/tmp/foo.log myprogram.c

When the program is run, in your /tmp/foo.log file you'd find something like:

2011-04-03 20:30:05 Currently, x=5, y=10

If you don't define DEBUG_FILENAME, the code basically goes away, shouldn't take up any space in your binary at all.

Fun with ones and zeros - c

Simple debugging output in C