Summary of DDD

The purpose of a debugger such as DDD is to allow you to see what is going on "inside" another program while it executes--or what another program was doing at the moment it crashed.

DDD can do four main kinds of things (plus other things in support of these) to help you catch bugs in the act:

  • Start your program, specifying anything that might affect its behavior.
  • Make your program stop on specified conditions.
  • Examine what has happened, when your program has stopped.
  • Change things in your program, so you can experiment with correcting the effects of one bug and go on to learn about another.

Technically speaking, DDD is a front-end to a command-line debugger (called Illegal HTML tag removed : inferior debugger, because it lies at the layer beneath DDD). DDD supports the following inferior debuggers:

  • To debug executable binaries, you can use DDD with GDB, DBX,

    Illegal HTML tag removed : Ladebug

    , or XDB.

    • GDB, the GNU debugger, is the recommended inferior debugger for DDD. GDB supports native executables binaries originally written in C, C++, Java, Modula-2, Modula-3, Pascal, Chill, Ada, and FORTRAN. (see Using GDB with Different Languages, for information on language support in GDB.)
    • As an alternative to GDB, you can use DDD with the DBX debugger, as found on several UNIX systems. Most DBX incarnations offer fewer features than GDB, and some of the more advanced DBX features may not be supported by DDD. However, using DBX may be useful if GDB does not understand or fully support the debugging information as generated by your compiler.

    • As an alternative to GDB and DBX, you can use DDD with

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      , as found on Compaq and DEC systems. Ladebug offers fewer features than GDB, and some of the more advanced Ladebug features may not be supported by DDD. However, using Ladebug may be useful if GDB or DBX do not understand or fully support the debugging information as generated by your compiler.1

    • As another alternative to GDB, you can use DDD with the XDB debugger, as found on HP-UX systems.2.
  • To debug Java byte code programs, you can use DDD with JDB, the Java debugger, as of JDK 1.1 and later. (DDD has been tested with JDK 1.1 and JDK 1.2.)
  • To debug Python programs, you can use DDD with PYDB, a Python debugger.

  • To debug Perl programs, you can use DDD with the

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    as of Perl 5.003 and later.

  • To debug Bash programs, you need a version Bash that supports extended debugging support. To get this enhanced version see http://bashdb.sourceforge.net. You will need version 2.05b-debugger-0.32 or later to work with DDD.

See Choosing an Inferior Debugger, for choosing the appropriate inferior debugger. See Sample Session, for getting a first impression of DDD.

  • About this Manual: Getting copies in various formats.
  • Typographic Conventions: Typographic conventions.
  • Free Software: How to copy and redistribute DDD.
  • Getting DDD: How to obtain copies of DDD.
  • Contributors: Who has done all this?
  • History: Old DDD versions.

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