Summary of GDB

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Summary of GDB

The purpose of a debugger such as the GNU debugger, GDB, is to allow you to see what is going on inside another program while it executes—or what another program was doing at the moment it stopped. GDB can do four main kinds of things to help you catch such problematic things that are called “bugs.”

- Start your program, specifying anything that might affect its behavior.
- Make your program stop on specified conditions.
- Examine what has happened, when your program has stopped.
- Change things in your program, so you can experiment with correcting the effects of one bug and go on to learn about another problem affecting your program.

You can use GDB to debug programs written in C and C++.

Support for Modula-2 and Chill is partial. For information on Modula-2, see Modula-2. There is no further documentation on Chill yet.

Debugging Pascal, a program which use sets, subranges, file variables, or nested functions, does not currently work. GDB does not support entering expressions, printing values, or similar features using Pascal syntax.

GDB can be used to debug programs written in Fortran, although it does not yet support entering expressions, printing values, or similar features using Fortran syntax. It may be necessary to refer to some variables with a trailing underscore.

For some specific discussion on GDB, see the following documentation.

- GDB as free software
- Contributors to GDB
- Installing GDB
- Controlling GDB
- Getting In and Out of GDB
- GDB Commands
- Running Programs Under GDB
- Stopping and Continuing
- Examining the Stack
- Examining Source Files
- Examining Data
- Using GDB with Different Languages
- Examining the Symbol Table
- Altering Execution
- GDB Files
- Specifying a Debugging Target
- Canned Sequences of Commands
- Using GDB under GNU Emacs
- Reporting Bugs in GDB
- Command Line Editing
- Using History Interactively
- Formatting Documentation
- Index

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