No crash dialog when a program crashes on Cygwin on Windows 7

Question

When, on Windows 7, I launch a console program that should crash, I have the following cases:

• If I double-click on it, it crashes and a "your program crashed" dialog popup opens up
• If I launch it through a DOS console, it crashes and a "your program crashed" dialog popup opens up
• If I launch it through a Cygwin console, it crashes silently. No dialog popup

Note that on Windows XP, everything works as expected (a dialog popup opens...), and I can debug the crashed program.

Is that a cygwin bug on Windows 7? A configuration problem?

Miscellaneous data

• My Cygwin is 1.7.5, but it was reproduced with a Cygwin 1.7.7.
• It works on WinXP, but fails on Cygwin on Windows 7 (32, or 64-bit)
• The dialog is interesting for dev/debug purposes

I wrote the following C++ program on Visual Studio 2008, in debug (32 bits or 64 bits have the same result):

#include <cstdio>
#include <windows.h>

int main()
{
   printf("It should crash now...") ;
   ::DebugBreak() ;
   return 0 ;
}

The ::DebugBreak()has been replaced by int * p = NULL ; *p = 42 ; (which is supposed to crash with an access violation exception), with exactly the bugged results on Cygwin.

Thanks !

Answer 1

I observed the same issue with recent versions of Cygwin. I don't yet know what's causing it, but the Windows SetErrorMode function seems to work a treat:

{
  const UINT oldErrorMode = ::SetErrorMode(0);
  ::DebugBreak();
  ::SetErrorMode(oldErrorMode);
}

Just a tip: if you're using MSVC, use the __debugbreak() intrinsic function instead. It puts the break at that point in the code, rather than inside a function called from there. Some inline assembly might do this trick on other compilers.