GDB Tricks: stack trace on a SIGSEGV

One thing I commonly use GDB for is getting a stack trace after a program I am working on sigfaults

I added this to my .bashrc

gcatch(){
  gdb -ex 'r' -ex 'back' -ex 'q' --args $*
}

So if my program segfaults I can press up and prepend gcatch to the command and voila! Stack trace.

The name gcatch comes from the frysk command line utility fcatch which performs the same job.

This entry was posted on April 22, 2010 at 9:17 pm and is filed under fedora, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “GDB Tricks: stack trace on a SIGSEGV”

Josh Stone Says:
April 22, 2010 at 10:48 pm | Reply
Nice tip! The $* will have issues if the command needs quoting though. I think “$@” will work better, or just use an alias so the args are implicitly appended as originally quoted:

alias gcatch=’gdb -ex r -ex back -ex q –args’
wagiaalla Says:
April 22, 2010 at 11:54 pm | Reply
Cool… alias it is
Colin Says:
April 23, 2010 at 12:41 am | Reply
Nice! I’d actually wondered how to do this. We should just stick this in the gdb package =)
Casey Dahlin Says:
April 23, 2010 at 5:26 am | Reply
you could also type gcatch !! instead of the press up/prepend dance.