dbx User's Guide

Table of Contents

About This Guide

What This Guide Contains

What You Should Know Before Reading This Guide

Suggestions for Further Reading

Conventions Used in This Guide

1. Getting Started With dbx

Examining Core Dumps to Determine Cause of Failure

Debugging Your Programs

Studying a New Program

Avoiding Common Pitfalls

2. Running dbx

Compiling a Program for Debugging Under dbx

Compiling and Linking Programs With Dynamic Shared Objects

Invoking dbx

Running Your Program

Automatically Executing Commands on Startup

Using Online Help

Entering Multiple Commands on a Single Line

Spanning a Command Across Multiple Lines

Invoking a Shell

Quitting dbx

3. Examining Source Files

Specifying Source Directories

Changing Source Files

Listing Source Code

Searching Through Source Code

Calling an Editor

4. Controlling dbx

Creating and Removing dbx Variables

Using the History Feature and the History Editor

Creating and Removing dbx Aliases

Recording and Playing Back dbx Input and Output

Executing dbx Scripts

5. Examining and Changing Data

Using Expressions

Printing Expressions

Using Data Types and Type Coercion (Casts)

Displaying and Changing Program Variables

Determining the Scope of Variables

Displaying Type Declarations

Examining the Stack

Using Interactive Function Calls

C++ Considerations

6. Controlling Program Execution

Setting Breakpoints

Tracing Program Execution

Writing Conditional Commands

Managing Breakpoints, Traces, and Conditional Commands

Using Signal Processing

Stopping at System Calls

Stepping Through Your Program

Starting at a Specified Line

7. Debugging Machine Language Code

Examining and Changing Register Values

Examining Memory and Disassembling Code

Setting Machine-Level Breakpoints

Continuing Execution After a Machine-Level Breakpoint

Tracing Execution at the Machine Level

Writing Conditional Commands at the Machine Level

Stepping Through Machine Code

8. Multiple Process Debugging

Processes

Listing Available Processes

Adding a Process to the Process Pool

Deleting a Process From the Process Pool

Selecting a Process

Suspending a Process

Resuming a Suspended Process

Waiting for a Resumed Process

Waiting for Any Running Process

Killing a Process

Handling fork System Calls

Handling exec System Calls

Handling sproc System Calls and Process Group Debugging

A. dbx Commands

B. Predefined Aliases

C. Predefined dbx Variables

Index