Hi guys,
I have posted this message on the UNIX begginers forum but on second thoughts felt that you all would know more about this as it has to do with debugging programs (cd be C). Anyways the doubt is
I want to print the values of the source level variables in the adb environment on Solaris platform, some command like the print variable name which is provided by the dbx environment.
I have tried with and w/o the -g compiled version of code with no success. If someone can throw some light on this it would be great ...........
regards

Adb doesn't know anything about source code and it ignores the information stored by the -g option. The only symbols it can find are external symbols.

If you to do source level debugging, you must use a source level debugger. You really need a strong grasp of assembly language to use adb. Sorry for the bad news.

(And I deleted your duplicate post.)

Even i thought so till i hit the
cm.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/vol2/adb.bun site, on the 5th page it shows
*charp/s as the method to access the source level variables. But
it didnt work for me on Solaris.

Can u please suggest a few sites where i could find the details on debuggers(especially the adb) and how to choose which one and when(i mean the criteria for selection..). I am sorry if i am asking very trivial doubts, as i am new to debugging on the unix platform.
And thanks for deleting the other post. I wasnt sure where to post.

Well, that link you posted is actually a very good one! I'm gonna print that page out and add it to my library. The best docs I have found on adb is HP's adb manual. Search for it at docs.hp.com.

But let's take a look at a couple of quotes from your link...Also, take a real good look at the sample program being debugged. Notice that all of the variables being debugged are externals. Few real programs are written like that. But those techniques being shown should work on Solaris for the same exact program.

As for symbolic debuggers, I don't know what to tell you. I have never heard of anyone shopping around for one. Each compiler comes with a debugger and I have always just gone with that. I have always assumed that the info deposited into a program by the -g option varies from compiler to compiler and therefore you can't mix and match compilers and debuggers. But now that I think of it, I'm not sure. There may be a standard.

And by the way, my idea of debugging is to just insert a few printf statements here and there as needed.

Just for historical reasons:


If you want the low down on adb on solaris and some really good uses for it, go on and get yo bad self:

PANIC! Unix System crash dump analysis


Great book and excellent tutorial on adb, and some really good background on how to handle panics and the core files for investigation of what your box did...



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