Intereseted in learning to about GDB? Well, you might be interested in this tutorial. GDB is used amongst professionals, hobbyists and beginning level coders across the globe. Debugging can be quite labor intensive, luckily GDB can make that struggle a whole lot easier. In this tutorial we'll go over some basic to advanced debugging techniques using GDB. I hope in the end you'll find that debugging without GDB to be a thing you once did in the past.
Well, GDB is just software you can use to debug your code. You can use GDB on a number of different languages. GDB is used to debug efficiently and professionally. And it is constantly being maintained and updated. You can find out more at https://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/
There are quite a bit of commands supported by GDB; however, we'll use only a select few in the tutorial. These are all the commands we'll look at in the tutorial. Keep in mind though, there are a lot more.
| Commands(Alias) | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
quit(q) |
(gdb) q |
used to quit gdb |
delete |
(gdb) d |
used to delete breakpoints |
continue(c) |
(gdb) c |
continue running program |
run(r) |
(gdb) r |
runs gdb on the given file |
list(l) |
(gdb) l |
lists 10 lines by default |
print(p) |
(gdb) p i |
print a variable, where i is the variable |
list(l) |
(gdb) l f(x) |
lists lines centered around function f(x) |
watch |
(gdb) watch var |
prompts user when watch var has changed |
set var |
(gdb) set var x = # |
Sets variable x to value right of = |
backtrace(bt) |
(gdb) bt |
|
list(l) |
(gdb) l 20 |
lists lines centered around #,where # is a line number |
set follow-fork-mode |
(gdb)set follow-fork-mode w |
follow w process, w is (child/parent) |
In this introduction video, we'll go over setting up GDB, as well as using some very basic GDB commands. You should be able to follow along fairly easily with this tutorial and see why gdb is so useful. Remember there are much more commands. This video just scratches the surface of how vital GDB is
If you're new to system calls or if you just have a hard time understanding them, this might help. Using GDB to debug large scale programs is made a whole lot easier with GDB. In this video we'll look at some more advanced commands that can help you with finding out which process is currently being executed.
