What is GDB?

GDB is a debugger.

A debugger is a program that is used to run other programs. In a debugger, a program may be executed, debugged, or a combination of both. Further, debuggers provide commands in order that data may be examined. There are many operations available in most debuggers.

The purpose of a debugger such as GDB is to allow 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.