Inspired by the "jist-in-time debugging" support in Windows, I wanted something similar for Linux. (It's not useful all that often, but it is nice every now and again.)
This library is my attempt at achieving this. It is intended to be used as an
LD_PRELOAD library, which will then intercept "abortable" conditions in
other processes. When it detects one, it spawns off a GDB instance and
attaches it to the process which is in its death throes.
The idea is that you'd only use it for your own programs during development, not system-wide. It will also only work for programs started from a console.
Simply run scons from the root of the directory. The only dependencies are
SCons itself and g++, and you'll need GDB to actually
run it.
You can also rebuild the manpage using a2x -f manpage -v libjitdbg.3.txt. This requires
Asciidoc.
To run some command using libjitdbg, just run
LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/libjitdbg/lib/libjitdbg.so your-command. Or, if you
want to run multiple such commands, you can always export LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/libjitdbg/lib/libjitdbg.so and then do stuff.
Be sure to read the caveats in the manpage! (You can view it with, e.g.,
less.)