implementing Struct Assignment and Nested Pointers in C on Windows 10
I'm having trouble with I'm performance testing and I'm working on a project and hit a roadblock. I'm working with a perplexing scenario with struct assignment in C, specifically when dealing with nested pointers. I'm trying to create a linked list of structs where each struct contains a pointer to another struct. The code compiles without errors, but I get unexpected behavior when I try to assign one struct to another. Here’s a simplified version of my code: ```c #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> typedef struct Node { int value; struct Node *next; } Node; void append(Node **head, int newValue) { Node *newNode = (Node *)malloc(sizeof(Node)); newNode->value = newValue; newNode->next = *head; *head = newNode; } void printList(Node *node) { while (node != NULL) { printf("%d ", node->value); node = node->next; } printf("\n"); } int main() { Node *head = NULL; append(&head, 10); append(&head, 20); append(&head, 30); Node anotherHead = {0, NULL}; anotherHead = *head; // This line is where I encounter issues printList(&anotherHead); return 0; } ``` When I attempt to assign `anotherHead` to the dereferenced `head`, I expect `anotherHead` to contain the same linked list as `head`. However, when I print `anotherHead`, it only shows the `value` of the head node (which is 30), and `next` points to NULL, losing the entire list structure. I have tried using `memcpy` instead of direct assignment, but that resulted in an even worse scenario where the program crashed due to memory access violations. I suspect that the question lies in how I'm handling the pointers, but I need to pinpoint the exact mistake. Running this on Windows 10 with GCC (MinGW) 11.2.0. Any insights on what I might be doing wrong would be greatly appreciated! I'm working on a API that needs to handle this. Any help would be greatly appreciated! How would you solve this? My development environment is macOS. My development environment is macOS. Any advice would be much appreciated.