From Cppwiki

The GNU debugger (GDB) is the debugger of choice on most Unix systems (some say it's a bit flaky on Solaris and/or SPARC), as well as on Cygwin.

$HOME/.gdbinit

By default, GDB is extremely C-centric, leaving us C++ users a bit wanting. However, it turns out that it has a number of features that make it more friendly to debug C++ code, if only you turn them on. To do this, you can add options to the file .gdbinit in your $HOME directory.

elo[i]'s .gdbinit looks something like this:

set print demangle
set print asm-demangle
set print object
set print vtbl
set overload-resolution on
set print array on
set print null-stop
set print pretty
set print object on
set print static-members off
set history save

handle SIGPIPE nostop noprint pass

How to debug a crash

1. compile with the -g option to put debugging symbols into your program: g++ -g myfile.cpp -o myprog
2. Start up the debugger: gdb ./myprog
3. Type run to start the program.
4. When it crashes, type bt (backtrace) to see the call stack.

References

• GDB manual
• Online reference with sample sessions