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While reading a symbol file, gdb occasionally encounters problems,
such as symbol types it does not recognize, or known bugs in compiler
output. By default, gdb does not notify you of such problems, since
they are relatively common and primarily of interest to people
debugging compilers. If you are interested in seeing information
about ill-constructed symbol tables, you can either ask gdb to print
only one message about each such type of problem, no matter how many
times the problem occurs; or you can ask gdb to print more messages,
to see how many times the problems occur, with the set
complaints
command (see Optional Warnings and Messages).
The messages currently printed, and their meanings, include:
inner block not inside outer block in
symbolgdb circumvents the problem by treating the inner block as if it had
the same scope as the outer block. In the error message, symbol
may be shown as “(don't know)
” if the outer block is not a
function.
block at
address out of order
gdb does not circumvent this problem, and has trouble
locating symbols in the source file whose symbols it is reading. (You
can often determine what source file is affected by specifying
set verbose on
. See Optional Warnings and Messages.)
bad block start address patched
gdb circumvents the problem by treating the symbol scope block as
starting on the previous source line.
bad string table offset in symbol
ngdb circumvents the problem by considering the symbol to have the
name foo
, which may cause other problems if many symbols end up
with this name.
unknown symbol type 0x
nn0x
nn is the symbol type of the
uncomprehended information, in hexadecimal.
gdb circumvents the error by ignoring this symbol information.
This usually allows you to debug your program, though certain symbols
are not accessible. If you encounter such a problem and feel like
debugging it, you can debug gdb
with itself, breakpoint
on complain
, then go up to the function read_dbx_symtab
and examine *bufp
to see the symbol.
stub type has NULL name
const/volatile indicator missing (ok if using g++ v1.x), got...
info mismatch between compiler and debugger