Introduction to GDB
GDB is the GNU project debugger. It can be used to see what a program is doing or what it was doing when it crashed. GDB can be used with a variety of languages. Because I’m learning C++, I’m going to explain it in the context of C++.
Adding debugging symbols
One of the stages of the compilation of a C++ program is to generate an object file (file.o). This object file contains what is called a symbol table, which contains each identifier in the code with information associated with it (type, constness, etc…).
If we want to be able to use GDB in one of our programs we need to add debugging information to this table (debug symbols). To add debug symbols to our binary we use the -g flag: