HP gnu source-level debugger 5992-4701 manual Summary of GDB, Free Software, Contributors to GDB

Summary of GDB

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 allows you to do the following:

•Load the executable along with any required arguments.

•Stop your program on specified blocks of code.

•Examine your program when it has stopped running due to an error.

•Change things in your program, so you can experiment with correcting the effects of one bug and go on to learn about another.

You can use GDB to debug programs written in C, C++, and Fortran. For more information, refer to the “Supported languages” (page 105). For more information on supported languages, refer to the “C and C++” (page 106).

GDB can be used to debug programs written in Fortran, although it may be necessary to refer to some variables with a trailing underscore. See “Fortran” (page 112).

This version of the manual documents WDB, implemented on HP 9000 or HP Integrity systems running Release 11.x of the HP-UX operating system. WDB can be used to debug code generated by the HP ANSI C, HP ANSI aC++ and HP Fortran compilers as well as the GNU C and C++ compilers. It does not support the debugging of Pascal, Modula-2 or Chill programs.

Free Software

GDB is free software, protected by the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL gives you the freedom to copy or adapt a licensed program―but every person getting a copy also gets with it the freedom to modify that copy (which means that they must get access to the source code), and the freedom to distribute further copies. Typical software companies use copyrights to limit your freedoms; the Free Software Foundation uses the GPL to preserve these freedoms.

Fundamentally, the General Public License is a license which says that you have these freedoms and that you cannot take these freedoms away from anyone else.

Contributors to GDB

Richard Stallman was the original author of GDB, and of many other GNU programs. Many others have contributed to its development. This section attempts to credit major contributors. One of the virtues of free software is that everyone is free to contribute to it; with regret, we cannot actually acknowledge everyone here. The file 'ChangeLog' in the GDB distribution approximates a blow-by-blow account.

Changes much prior to version 2.0 are lost in the mists of time.

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