Dearest Luggies, I am very sorry for not sending language tip yesterday. I was away from the computer. I shall send today evening.
gdb is the canonical C debugger. It is not a graphical tool and there is a graphical front end called ddd developed by Germans. But I did not like it much. gdb comes built in with many many features like bash. It has completion features and several aliasing features. For instance you can type (gdb) list or (gdb) l or (gdb) li with the same result. And it is a very comprehensive debugging tool. Nowadays I don't rely on gdb much since I use printf()s to track what is going on in my code. But gdb is very essential for program development in C. The most important commands in gdb are (at least according to me) o (gdb) where shows the stack trace and it will tell you which sequence of function calls crashed your program o (gdb) list shows you the next 10 line numbers o (gdb) b main sets the breakpoint at main. If you have the same function name declared in multiple source files as static, then you can say b foo.c:barfunction to specify that you want to break at barfunction() in foo.c file o (gdb) step or 's' goes into the function. Very useful for stepping into functions after breakpoint. o (gdb) next or 'n' goes to the next function. You can skip loops using 'n'. o (gdb) continue or 'c' continues beyond the breakpoint. Debuggers are a big topic. Hope this gets you started. -Girish -- Gayatri Hitech web: http://gayatri-hitech.com SpamCheetah Spam filter: http://spam-cheetah.com _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, email ilugc-requ...@ae.iitm.ac.in with "unsubscribe <password> <address>" in the subject or body of the message. http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
