GDB: The GNU Project Debugger

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GDB: The GNU Project Debugger

What is GDB?

GDB, the GNU Project debugger, allows 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 act:

Start your program, specifying anything that might affect its behavior.
Make your program stop on specified conditions.
Examine what has happened, when your program has stopped.
Change things in your program, so you can experiment with correcting the effects of one bug and go on to learn about another.

The program being debugged can be written in C, C++, Pascal, Objective-C (and many other languages). Those programs might be executing on the same machine as GDB (native) or on another machine (remote). GDB can run on most popular UNIX and Microsoft Windows variants.

GDB version 6.4

Version 6.4 of GDB, the GNU Debugger, is now available for download. See the ANNOUNCEMENT for details including changes in this release.

An errata list (PROBLEMS) and documentation are also available.

FSF's Position regarding SCO's attacks on Free Software

News

December 2, 2005: GDB 6.4 Released!

The latest version of GDB, version 6.4, is available for download.

Changes in this release include:

New native configurations (OpenBSD/arm, OpenBSD/mips64)
New targets (ms1-elf, mn10300-elf)
User-level thread support in BSD
It is now possible to debug programs using the user-level threads library on selected targets running OpenBSD and FreeBSD.

See the NEWS file for a more complete and detailed list of what this release includes.

November 2, 2005: GDB 6.4 branch created

The GDB 6.4 branch (gdb_6_4-branch) has been created. To check out a copy of the branch use:

cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@sources.redhat.com:/cvs/src co -r gdb_6_4-branch gdb

November 9, 2004: GDB 6.3 Released!

The latest version of GDB, version 6.3, is available for download.

Changes in this release include:

GDB works with GCC -feliminate-dwarf2-dups
GDB now supports a more compact representation of DWARF-2 debug information using DW_FORM_ref_addr references. These are produced by GCC with the option -feliminate-dwarf2-dups and also by some proprietary compilers. With GCC, you must use GCC 3.3.4 or later to use -feliminate-dwarf2-dups.
Internationalization
When supported by the host system, GDB will be built with internationalization (libintl). The task of marking up the sources is continued, we're looking forward to our first translation.
Ada
Initial support for debugging programs compiled with the GNAT implementation of the Ada programming language has been integrated into GDB. In this release, support is limited to expression evaluation.

Late breaking information, such as recently added features, can be found in the NEWS file in the gdb source tree. Old announcements are in the news archive.

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Last modified 2006-01-20.