What happens if the indirection operator is applied to a pointer that is not initialized in C?

If the indirection operator is applied to a pointer that is not initialized in C, it leads to undefined behavior. This is because an uninitialized pointer might point to some arbitrary location in memory, which may not be a valid address or may not be accessible, leading to a segmentation fault or other unexpected behavior.

Here are the steps that describe what happens:

1. The indirection operator (*) is used to access the value at the address stored in the pointer.

2. If the pointer is not initialized, it doesn't contain a valid address. Instead, it contains some garbage value.

3. When the indirection operator tries to access the value at this garbage address, it could lead to a segmentation fault if the address is not accessible or doesn't exist.

4. Even if the program doesn't crash, it will still lead to undefined behavior because the value at the garbage address is unpredictable.

Therefore, it's always a good practice to initialize pointers before using them to avoid such issues.