September 2008
Intermediate to advanced
280 pages
6h 31m
English

A symbolic debugger such as GDB can run your program, just like you can. However, with the magic of including debugging symbols in the executable, the debugger gives the illusion of executing the program line by line of source code, instead of instruction by instruction of compiled machine code. This seemingly humble fact is precisely what makes a symbolic debugger so useful in debugging programs.
If all the debugger could do is run a program, it wouldn't be of much use to us. We could certainly do the same thing, and more efficiently, to boot. The usefulness of the debugger lies in the fact that ...