On Aug 31, 2011, at 10:45 AM, Scott Vargovich wrote:

> Here's what gdb shows:
> 
> <command line>
> scott@enigma1:~$ gdb xiphos
> GNU gdb (Ubuntu/Linaro 7.2-1ubuntu11) 7.2
> Copyright (C) 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
> This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
> There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  Type "show copying"
> and "show warranty" for details.
> This GDB was configured as "i686-linux-gnu".
> For bug reporting instructions, please see:
> <http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/bugs/>...
> Reading symbols from /usr/bin/xiphos...(no debugging symbols found)...done.
> (gdb)
> </command line>
> 
> I did read the man page, but not sure how to proceed from here.  HELP???

GDB is only going to be useful if you have the debugging symbols for the 
program you're trying to debug.

When the compiler emits the final machine code, it has the option of emitting a 
(lot) of additional information in the execution binary which illustrates 
function names and variable offsets. It helps tie the source code to the 
generated code. GDB uses this to say "Hey, this pointer here named 'foo' 
defined on line 23 of file bar.c goes to garbage data" instead of "Hey, this 
pointer here at memory offset 0xfff923a23 goes to garbage data!"

Overall, unless you're interested in learning a lot about programming and the 
dark arts of debugging, I strongly recommend you just submit a bug report. For 
a userland application like what you're using, the probability that they'd have 
a debug build in the repo is about nil; you'd have to download the source 
yourself and build it. And at that point, what's the point? Then you'd just get 
a more up-to-date version that probably works better anyways.

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Linux Users Group.
To post a message, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected]
For more options, visit our group at 
http://groups.google.com/group/linuxusersgroup
References can be found at: http://goo.gl/anqri
Please remember to abide by our list rules (http://tinyurl.com/LUG-Rules or 
http://cdn.fsdev.net/List-Rules.pdf)

Reply via email to