can anyone suggest a good program for debugging a C program?

Question

I need to debug a C program that includes posix threads, socket programming (udp client, server). I use ubuntu 12.04 and as IDE/SDK, Qt Creator 2.4.1 and Netbeans IDE 7.1.2. I know they use gdb for debugging.

When I start to debug my program, the program stops running after 5 min or so and neither Qt Creator or Netbeans output any error or warning, although I use debugging feature and my program suppose to listen for a UDP port.

I use printf for all line of my code, and I can see that my program works as it suppose to and listen the UDP port and waits. I can not figure the problem out why it stops without any reason and since IDEs that I am using do not show any debug error, warning, I can not think any reason.

I wonder if anyone can suggest me a debug program that monitors all/some variables and threads during the run time. Thank you.

Answer 1

gdb isn't too comfortable but always available.

To do runtime analysis of different types, especially checking memory access, Valgrind (see here for docs) might be the tool of choice.

Update: I'm referring to *IX systems. For Windows gbd also works in the cygwin enviroment. Nativly there is VC Express, which is free and includes IDE and debugger.

Answer 2

I'm not quite sure what debugger is used for your kind of application. The only debugger I know about on Linux is gdb. It along with printf statements is all I need.

gdb is simple, though not "too comfortable" as @alk said, but seems to be ubiquitous.

There is also Eclipse, and that's quite a nice development and debugging platform, too.

Answer 3

An old, but reliable tool is ddd, which is basically the gdb GUI wrapper. Although, I usually do debugging directly with Emacs, ddd is the tool that you'll be able to run on almost all *nix platforms.