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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 to help you catch bugs.

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.

You can use GDB to debug programs written in C and C++.

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

Debugging Pascal, a program 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.

For some additional discussion on GDB, see the following documentation.