assembly - How to print a character in Linux x86 NASM?

Question

I'm trying to print a single character or a number using NASM, targeting an x86 GNU/Linux architecture.

Here's the code I'm using:

section .text
    global _start

_start:

    ; Linux printing preparation
    mov eax,4            
    mov ebx,1       

    ; Print 'A' character 
    mov ecx,'A'     ; ecx should contain the value to print
    mov edx,1       ; edx should contain how many characters to print
    int 80h

    ; System exit
    mov eax,1            
    mov ebx,0            
    int 80h

Running this code, however, prints nothing. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

ecx should contain a pointer to the start of your char buffer. So you have to have your buffer in memory. You can do the following:

; Print 'A' character 
mov   eax, 4      ; __NR_write from asm/unistd_32.h (32-bit int 0x80 ABI)
mov   ebx, 1      ; stdout fileno

push  'A'
mov   ecx, esp    ; esp now points to your char
mov   edx, 1      ; edx should contain how many characters to print
int   80h         ; sys_write(1, "A", 1)

; return value in EAX = 1 (byte written), or error (-errno)

add   esp, 4      ; restore esp if necessary

You can mov byte [esp], 'A' or whatever other address if it's OK to overwrite whatever is on the stack.

Or you can have a character array in section .rodata instead of storing on the fly.

---

Making a write() system call with the const void *buf arg being some small number (like 'A') will make it return -EFAULT without printing anything. The kernel has to check the pointer anyway, and system calls return an error instead of raising SIGSEGV on bad pointers.

Use strace ./my_program to trace the system calls you actually made, including decoding the return values.