C/C++ Debugging techniques

C/C++ Debugging techniques

[Adam Luchjenbroers]

I plan to start doing some debugging and stabilisation work on an open-source 
project. It provides the functionality I'm looking for but is incredibly 
unstable.

So I plan to attempt to fix the code. Before I started I thought I'd ask for 
advice on techniques for debugging code and how to make use of things such as 
core-dumps to find the problem. I hope to learn something from the advice 
people may give me.

Re: C/C++ Debugging techniques

[Elias Athanasopoulos]

On Wed, Jun 12, 2002 at 09:31:47PM +0930, Adam Luchjenbroers wrote:

> So I plan to attempt to fix the code. Before I started I thought I'd ask for 
> advice on techniques for debugging code and how to make use of things such as 
> core-dumps to find the problem. I hope to learn something from the advice 
> people may give me.

Use Electric Fence or memprof to find critical memory corruption errors,
mem leaks, etc. Inspect the core files using gdb to see where the bug
is:

% gdb ./foo ./core
[...]
% where

Elias

-- 
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Re: C/C++ Debugging techniques

[chuckw]

On Wed, Jun 12, 2002 at 09:31:47PM +0930, Adam Luchjenbroers wrote:
> I plan to start doing some debugging and stabilisation work on an open-source 
> project. It provides the functionality I'm looking for but is incredibly 
> unstable.
> 
> So I plan to attempt to fix the code. Before I started I thought I'd ask for 
> advice on techniques for debugging code and how to make use of things such as 
> core-dumps to find the problem. I hope to learn something from the advice 
> people may give me.
> -
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If you are inexperienced with command line debuggers, there are a few nice
graphical ones.  The one I use is ddd which is a frontend to gdb and a few
other possible debuggers.

Chuck