GDB

GDB is a debugger (much information, I know, but I’m just writing this down quickly for me to remember).

Using GDB

Start the debugger:

gdb

This opens a CLI. In this CLI, you can then attach to a process:

(gdb) attach <pid>

and let the process execution continue using c:

(gdb) c

Afterwards, it will execute the program. If some error occurs, e.g. a SegFault, you can use bt to get a backtrace:

(gdb) bt

If debug-symbols are enabled at compile time, you will also get line numbers of the code.

You can also run many commands, like p to print out variables:

(gdb) p <var>

This uses the C syntax, so you can also derefernce pointers, access some array element etc., just like you would in C. According to my supervisors of my bachelor’s thesis, executing C functions doesn’t work well though (although that might be a limitation of old legacy software on our cluster).

Oh, and btw, you can quit it with q:

(gdb) q