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Copyright (C) 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Published by the Free Software Foundation
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Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
Printed copies are available for $20 each.
ISBN 1-882114-11-6
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided also that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions.

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 can do four main kinds of things (plus other things in support of these) to help you catch bugs in the act:

You can use GDB to debug programs written in C or C++. For more information, see section C and C++.

Support for Modula-2 and Chill is partial. For information on Modula-2, see section Modula-2. There is no further documentation on Chill yet.

Debugging Pascal programs which use sets, subranges, file variables, or nested functions does not currently work. GDB does not support entering expressions, printing values, or similar features using Pascal syntax.

GDB can be used to debug programs written in Fortran, although it does not yet support entering expressions, printing values, or similar features using Fortran syntax. It may be necessary to refer to some variables with a trailing underscore.


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