Why does the call to bsearch() crash the presented program?

Question

I have an unsorted dictionary file named "dict.txt". I have managed to put the words of the file in an array and the qsort() I use also seems to be working just fine (That is, the array is sorted).

The problem arises when I call bsearch(), the program crashes and my question is:

Why is this happening?

I use gcc to compile and don't use an IDE of any sort so I don't have any debugger nor do I know how to use one (yet).

I am quite aware that the code presented here might contain several problems.

That is because I am quite new to c and my background is mainly Java (which despite the similarities seems to be a drawback, because I am so used to OO and c is obviously not OO).

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

int strcmp_mod(const void *p1, const void *p2) {
   return strcmp(* (char * const *) p1, * (char * const *) p2);
}

int main(void) {

int size, i;
char **words;

char *pItem;
char *key = "fight";

char* buf = load_file("dict.txt"); if (buf == NULL) return 1;

size = count_words(buf);

words = (char**)malloc((size+1) * sizeof(char*));

for (i=0; i<size; i++) {
    words[i] = (char*)malloc(80 * sizeof(char));
}   

copy_words_to_lower(buf, words, size);
    words[size] = '\0';

    qsort(words, size, sizeof(char*), strcmp_mod);

for (i=0; i<size; i++) {
    printf("%s\n", words[i]);
}  

pItem = (char *) bsearch(key, words, size, sizeof(char*), strcmp_mod);

if (pItem!=NULL)
    printf ("%s is in the array.\n", pItem);
else
    printf ("%s is not in the array.\n", key); 

return 0;
}

Answer 1

Try giving bsearch the address of key.