Directly assigning values to C Pointers

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The problem is that you’re not initializing the pointer. You’ve created a pointer to “anywhere you want”—which could be the address of some other variable, or the middle of your code, or some memory that isn’t mapped at all.

You need to create an int variable somewhere in memory for the int * variable to point at.

Your second example does this, but it does other things that aren’t relevant here. Here’s the simplest thing you need to do:

int main(){
    int variable;
    int *ptr = &variable;
    *ptr = 20;
    printf("%d", *ptr);
    return 0;
}

Here, the int variable isn’t initialized—but that’s fine, because you’re just going to replace whatever value was there with 20. The key is that the pointer is initialized to point to the variable. In fact, you could just allocate some raw memory to point to, if you want:

int main(){
    void *memory = malloc(sizeof(int));
    int *ptr = (int *)memory;
    *ptr = 20;
    printf("%d", *ptr);
    free(memory);
    return 0;
}

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