4. Viewing and Navigating To Code
5. Controlling Program Execution
6. Setting Breakpoints and Traces
8. Evaluating and Displaying Data
11. Debugging Multithreaded Applications
16. Debugging Fortran Using dbx
17. Debugging a Java Application With dbx
18. Debugging at the Machine-Instruction Level
19. Using dbx With the Korn Shell
20. Debugging Shared Libraries
Startup Sequence and .init Sections
To set a breakpoint in a shared library, dbx needs to know that a program will use that library when it runs, and dbx needs to load the symbol table for the library. To determine which libraries a newly-loaded program will use when it runs, dbx executes the program just long enough for the runtime linker to load all of the starting libraries. dbx then reads the list of loaded libraries and kills the process. The libraries remain loaded and you can set breakpoints in them before rerunning the program for debugging.
dbx follows the same procedure for loading the libraries whether the program is loaded from the command line with the dbx command, from the dbx prompt with the debug command, or in the IDE.