Dbx (debugger)

Last updated
dbx
Original author(s) Mark Linton
Developer(s) Oracle Corporation
Initial release1981;44 years ago (1981)
Operating system Unix and Unix-like
Type Debugger
License Free for download and use as described in the Sun Studio product license.

dbx is a source-level debugger found primarily on Solaris, AIX, IRIX, Tru64 UNIX, Linux and BSD operating systems. It provides symbolic debugging for programs written in C, C++, Fortran, Pascal and Java. Useful features include stepping through programs one source line or machine instruction at a time. In addition to simply viewing operation of the program, variables can be manipulated and a wide range of expressions can be evaluated and displayed.

Contents

History

dbx was originally developed at University of California, Berkeley, by Mark Linton during the years 1981–1984 [1] and subsequently made its way to various vendors who had licensed BSD.

Availability

dbx is provided with AIX, [2] and was also provided with IRIX [3] and Tru64 UNIX. [4]

It is included as part of the Oracle Solaris Studio product from Oracle Corporation, [5] and is supported on both Solaris and Linux. It supports programs compiled with the Oracle Solaris Studio compilers and GCC.

It is also available on IBM z/OS systems, in the UNIX System Services component. [6] dbx for z/OS can debug programs written in C and C++, and can also perform machine level debugging. As of z/OS V1R5, dbx is able to debug programs using the DWARF debug format. z/OS V1R6 added support for debugging 64-bit programs.

GCC removed support for stabs debugging symbols in release 13, so that dbx is not supported as a debugger for GCC-compiled code. [7]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Linton, Mark A. (1990). "The Evolution of Dbx". USENIX Summer. USENIX Summer 1990 Technical Conference. pp. 211–220. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.38.5985 . S2CID   15074926.
  2. ↑ "AIX 7.3 dbx symbolic debug program overview". IBM.
  3. ↑ dbx(1)  : Provides source-level debugging - SGI techpubs library
  4. ↑ dbx(1)  : source level debugger - HP Tru64 UNIX Section 1 Reference Pages
  5. ↑ "Oracle Developer Studio 12.6: Debugging a Program With dbx". Oracle Corporation.
  6. ↑ "z/OS 3.1 UNIX System Services Programming Tools" (PDF). IBM.
  7. ↑ "GCC Change notes".
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