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<h1 class="settitle">Debugging with GDB</h1>
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<h2 class="unnumbered">Summary of <span class="sc">gdb</span></h2>
<p>The purpose of a debugger such as <span class="sc">gdb</span> is to allow you to see what is
going on &ldquo;inside&rdquo; another program while it executes&mdash;or what another
program was doing at the moment it crashed.
<p><span class="sc">gdb</span> can do four main kinds of things (plus other things in support of
these) to help you catch bugs in the act:
<ul>
<li>Start your program, specifying anything that might affect its behavior.
<li>Make your program stop on specified conditions.
<li>Examine what has happened, when your program has stopped.
<li>Change things in your program, so you can experiment with correcting the
effects of one bug and go on to learn about another.
</ul>
<p>You can use <span class="sc">gdb</span> to debug programs written in C and C<tt>++</tt>.
For more information, see <a href="Supported-Languages.html#Supported-Languages">Supported Languages</a>.
For more information, see <a href="C.html#C">C and C++</a>.
<p>Support for D is partial. For information on D, see
<a href="D.html#D">D</a>.
<p><a name="index-Modula_002d2-1"></a>Support for Modula-2 is partial. For information on Modula-2, see
<a href="Modula_002d2.html#Modula_002d2">Modula-2</a>.
<p><a name="index-Pascal-2"></a>Debugging Pascal programs which use sets, subranges, file variables, or
nested functions does not currently work. <span class="sc">gdb</span> does not support
entering expressions, printing values, or similar features using Pascal
syntax.
<p><a name="index-Fortran-3"></a><span class="sc">gdb</span> can be used to debug programs written in Fortran, although
it may be necessary to refer to some variables with a trailing
underscore.
<p><span class="sc">gdb</span> can be used to debug programs written in Objective-C,
using either the Apple/NeXT or the GNU Objective-C runtime.
<ul class="menu">
<li><a accesskey="1" href="Free-Software.html#Free-Software">Free Software</a>: Freely redistributable software
<li><a accesskey="2" href="Contributors.html#Contributors">Contributors</a>: Contributors to GDB
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