Technical Q&A QA1032
Late breaking news for the MacsBug gdb plugin


Q: How can I get the gdb MacsBug plugin to work properly in Mac OS X 10.0?

A: A special MacsBug plugin ships for gdb on the Mac OS X Developer CD, enabling you to use many of the traditional MacsBug commands from gdb. Instructions, etc. can be found in /usr/libexec/gdb/plugins/MacsBug/README.txt (Enter this path minus 'README.txt' in Finder's Go To Folder sheet to go there). There are a couple of issues, however, with the plugin:

1) Due to a build error, the file /usr/libexec/gdb/plugins/MacsBug/gdbinit-MacsBug needs one line to be manually edited. The load-plugin line in the last line of the file needs to look like,

load-plugin /usr/libexec/gdb/plugins/MacsBug/MacsBug

In other words delete the portion of the pathname preceding /usr.

Note that since this file is within /usr you need to run your editor with 'sudo' (to gain a higher level of permissions; for example, 'sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit /usr/libexec/gdb/plugins/MacsBug/gdbinit-MacsBug' from the command line) to allow the update.

2) The README file mentions an install-MacsBug script. That file was not installed so that portion of the README should be ignored.


[May 03 2001]


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