Palm Programming: The Developer's Guide

Source-Level Debugging with GNU PalmPilot SDK

The GNU tools can’t debug an application running on the handheld. You only have POSE available to you. To debug:

1. Compile and link your application with the -g flag.

2. Run POSE and load your application.

3. Run an intermediary application called gdbplug , which communicates via TCP/IP to GDB. It communicates with POSE using a POSE debugging protocol. See http://www.tiac.net/users/thomas/pilot-gdbplug.html for documentation and the latest version.

   In a separate DOS window, run:

   gdbplug -port 2000 -enable

4. Run GDB. Pass as a command-line argument your linked file, not the PRC (if your application is foo, pass foo as the parameter, not foo.prc):

   m68k-palmos-coff-gdb your_linked_app

5. Within GDB, specify the PalmPilot as a target by executing:

   target pilot localhost:2000

6. Within POSE, start your application. GDB stops at the first line.

Here are the most important commands that GDB supports:

print expressionToPrint1, ..., expressionToPrintN

Use the print command to look at the values of variables. Here’s an example:

print *myStructPtr, theString[5], myOtherStruct.x

backtrace

Prints a stack crawl, showing each function in the stack, including parameter names and values.

step

Single-steps, stepping into functions.

next

Single-steps, stepping over functions.

cont

Continues running the program until it reaches a breakpoint, causes an error, or exits.

break funcNameOrLineNumber

Sets a breakpoint. You can break at a function:

break MyFunction

Or you can set a breakpoint ...