gdb

Debugging a program which makes heavy use of templates has been a little frustrating. Since then entire definition of a template must be available to the compiler whenever the template is instantiated (for GCC anyway), the template declaration and definition both end up in a header file. For some reason, gdb can't find the header files where these templates are defined, even though the .cc files are in the same directory. When one needs to step through template code, that is rather annoying.

Fortunately, there is an easy solution. The gdb command 'dir PATH' where PATH is the path to your source files tells gdb where to find the header files, and everything works fine after that.

gdb history is not set up by default on Debian. Fortunately, that is easy to fix too. Add the following to your ~/.gdbinit file:

Merry Christmas and Happy Debugging, er, Holidays.