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C
HAPTER
5
Working with GNU
Debugger
he debugger is one of the most important components of any devel-
opment system. No programmer writes a code that works on the first
attempt or that does not have any bugs in it. Most of the time you have to
go through debugging processes of your programs time and again. There-
fore no development system is complete without a debugger. The GNU
compiler, Emacs editor and other utilities work very closely with GNU
debugger, also known as
gdb
, which is the debugger of choice of all open
source developers community as well as for many commercial products.
Many commercial debuggers are also built on top of GNU debugger.
In addition to command line debugging features, you can find many GUI
front ends to the GNU debugger. These front ends include the famous
xxgdb
.
There are many other debuggers available in the open source community.
Some of these debuggers are also introduced at the end of this chapter.
This chapter provides a comprehensive working knowledge of
gdb
and
how to use it. The text is accompanied by many examples to elaborate
concepts presented here. After going through this chapter you should be
able to debug many types of programs.
T