Read and write to a memory location

This is throwing a segment violation (SEGFAULT), as it should, as you don't know what is put in that address. Most likely, that is kernel space, and the hosting environment doesn't want you willy-nilly writing to another application's memory. You should only ever write to memory that you KNOW your program has access to, or you will have inexplicable crashes at runtime.

You are doing it except on your system you cannot write to this memory causing a segmentation fault.

A segmentation fault (often shortened to segfault), bus error or access violation is generally an attempt to access memory that the CPU cannot physically address. It occurs when the hardware notifies an operating system about a memory access violation. The OS kernel then sends a signal to the process which caused the exception. By default, the process receiving the signal dumps core and terminates. The default signal handler can also be overridden to customize how the signal is handled.

If you are interested in knowing more look up MMU on wikipedia.

Here is how to legally request memory from the heap. The malloc() function takes a number of bytes to allocate as a parameter. Please note that every malloc() should be matched by a free() call to that same memory after you are done using it. The free() call should normally be in the same function as where you called malloc().

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
    int val;
    char *a;

    a = (char*)malloc(sizeof(char) * 1);

    *a = 20;
    val = (int)*a;
    printf("%d", val);

    free(a);

    return 0;
}

You can also allocate memory on the stack in a very simple way like so:

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
    int val;
    char *a;
    char b;

    a = &b;
    *a = 20;
    val = (int)*a;

    printf("%d", val);

    return 0;
}