Debugging With Gdb: The Gnu Source-Level Debugger Fifth Edition, for Gdb Version, April 1998

by Richard M. Stallman, Roland H. Pesch

Debugging with GDB details the GNU GDB debugging utility. The purpose of a debugger such as GDB is to allow you to see what is going on "inside" another program while it executes--or what another program was doing at the moment it crashed. GDB can do four main kinds of things (plus other things in support of these) to help you catch bugs in the * Start your program, specifying anything that might affect its behavior.
* Make your program stop on specified conditions.
* Examine what happened when your program stopped.
* Change things in your program so you can experiment with correcting the effects of one bug and go on to learn about another. You can use GDB to debug programs written in C or C++. This book is a printed version of the GDB documentation, available online from the Free Software Foundation.

Genres: Computers, Programming

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Richard Matthew Stallman is a software developer and software freedom activist. In 1983 he announced the project to develop the GNU operating system, a Unix-like operating system meant to be entirely free software, and has been the project's leader ever since. With that announcement Stallman also launched the Free Software Movement. In October 1985 he started the Free Software Foundation.

The GNU/Linux system, which is a variant of GNU that also uses the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds, are used in tens or hundreds of millions of computers, and are now preinstalled in computers available in retail stores. However, the distributors of these systems often disregard the ideas of freedom which make free software important.

That is why, since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time in political advocacy for free software, and spreading the ethical ideas of the movement, as well as campaigning against both software patents and dangerous extension of copyright laws. Before that, Stallman developed a number of widely used software components of the GNU system, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various other programs for the GNU operating system.

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, and is the main author of the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.

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Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why yes, I did read the entire book from cover to cover. Real, dead tree paper, too. Ordered straight from the FSF website. It's a software manual. It's a good software manual. It's thorough. You will learn GDB if you read this book. You can skip a lot of the internals, API, and discussion about exotic hardware. But don't skip all of the internals - the "info symbol" and "info address" commands have been very helpful in assembly debugging. Oh, and I never would have tried writing GDB scripts if I hadn't read this.