Does it help if you use absolute paths instead of relative paths when passing files to lcov
?
I ran into a similiar problem where lcov
also failed to write the file.
Not sure if it is a bug in lcov
, but the problem was that it got confused with relative paths:
lcov -a test_fast_cxxtest_gcov__base.info -a test_fast_cxxtest_gcov__test.info \
-o test_fast_cxxtest_gcov__total.info
Combining tracefiles.
Reading tracefile test_fast_cxxtest_gcov__base.info
Reading tracefile test_fast_cxxtest_gcov__test.info
lcov: WARNING: function data mismatch at /home/phil/ghost/constants.h:1862
Writing data to test_fast_cxxtest_gcov__total.info
lcov: ERROR: cannot write to test_fast_cxxtest_gcov__total.info!
Running it with strace
revealed that it executes chdir("/")
on several locations, which changes the working directory to /
. That explains why it cannot write the file.
One workaround is to use absolute paths. For instance, if you are using GNU make, you can use the abspath
command:
lcov -a $(abspath test_fast_cxxtest_gcov__base.info) \
-a $(abspath test_fast_cxxtest_gcov__test.info) \
-o $(abspath test_fast_cxxtest_gcov__total.info)
After that change, it was finally able to write the file.
(Other options like trying to set the directories using the --base-directory
or --directory
option did not have an effect, as far as I saw.
The version of lcov
that I tested with is 1.12.)
The problem is not limited to Ubuntu, as I ran into it on Arch Linux. It could be a regression introduced in 1.12, however, so I reported it (see issue #77630).
Update: Lcov is not part of GCC, so my original bug report was closed, but I got an answer from the Lcov mailing list. The problem is already fixed in commit 632c25. Users of Arch Linux based distros can try the latest snapshot with aur/lcov-git.