December 2005
Beginner to intermediate
618 pages
20h 19m
English
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Chapter 20. Debugging C Programs with GDB
An important part of software development is testing and troubleshooting. In a large program, programming errors, or bugs, are practically inevitable. Programs can deliver wrong results, get hung up in infinite loops, or crash due to illegal memory operations. The task of finding and eliminating such errors is called debugging a program.
Many bugs are not apparent by simply studying the source code. Extra output provided by a testing version of the program is one helpful diagnostic technique. You can add statements to display the contents of variables and other information during runtime. However, you can generally perform runtime diagnostics much more efficiently by using a debugger.
A debugger is a program that runs another program in a finely controlled environment. For example, a debugger allows you to run the program step by step, observing the contents of variables, memory locations, and CPU registers after each statement. You can also analyze the sequence of function calls that lead to a given point in the program.
This chapter is an introduction to one powerful and widely used debugger, the GNU debugger or GDB. The sections that follow describe GDB’s basic options and commands. Most of the features and working principles described here are similar to those of other debugging tools. For a complete description of GDB’s capabilities, see the program manual “Debugging with GDB” by the Free Software Foundation , which is available in PDF ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.