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Oracle Solaris Studio 12.3: Debugging a Program With dbx     Oracle Solaris Studio 12.3 Information Library
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Document Information

Preface

1.  Getting Started With dbx

2.  Starting dbx

3.  Customizing dbx

4.  Viewing and Navigating To Code

5.  Controlling Program Execution

6.  Setting Breakpoints and Traces

7.  Using the Call Stack

8.  Evaluating and Displaying Data

9.  Using Runtime Checking

10.  Fixing and Continuing

11.  Debugging Multithreaded Applications

12.  Debugging Child Processes

13.  Debugging OpenMP Programs

14.  Working With Signals

Understanding Signal Events

Catching Signals

Changing the Default Signal Lists

Trapping the FPE Signal (Solaris Platforms Only)

Determining Where the Exception Occurred

Determining the Cause of the Exception

Sending a Signal to a Program

Automatically Handling Signals

15.  Debugging C++ With dbx

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

A.  Modifying a Program State

B.  Event Management

C.  Macros

D.  Command Reference

Index

Catching Signals

By default, the catch list contains many of the more than 33 detectable signals. (The numbers depend upon the operating system and version.) You can change the default catch list by adding signals to or removing them from the default catch list.


Note - The list of signal names that dbx accepts includes all of those supported by the versions of the Solaris operating environment that dbx supports. So dbx might accept a signal that is not supported by the version of the Solaris operating environment you are running. For example, dbx might accept a signal that is supported by the Solaris 9 OS even through you are running the Solaris 7 OS. For a list of the signals supported by the Solaris OS you are running, see the signal(3head) man page.


To see the list of signals currently being trapped, type catch with no signal argument.

(dbx) catch

To see a list of the signals currently being ignored by dbx when the program detects them, type ignore with no signal argument.

(dbx) ignore

Changing the Default Signal Lists

You control which signals cause the program to stop by moving the signal names from one list to the other. To move signal names, supply a signal name that currently appears on one list as an argument to the other list.

For example, to move the QUIT and ABRT signals from the catch list to the ignore list:

(dbx) ignore QUIT ABRT

Trapping the FPE Signal (Solaris Platforms Only)

Often programmers working with code that requires floating point calculations want to debug exceptions generated in a program. When a floating point exception like overflow or divide by zero occurs, the system returns a reasonable answer as the result for the operation that caused the exception. Returning a reasonable answer lets the program continue executing quietly. The Solaris OS implements the IEEE Standard for Binary Floating Point Arithmetic definitions of reasonable answers for exceptions.

Because a reasonable answer for floating point exceptions is returned, exceptions do not automatically trigger the signal SIGFPE. Some integer exceptions, such as dividing an integer by zero and integer overflow do, by default, trigger the signal SIGFPE.

To find the cause of an exception, you need to set up a trap handler in the program so that the exception triggers the signal SIGFPE. (See ieee_handler(3m) man page for an example of a trap handler.)

You can enable a trap using:

When you set up a trap handler using the ieee_handler command, the trap enable mask in the hardware floating point status register is set. This trap enable mask causes the exception to raise the SIGFPE signal at run time.

Once you have compiled the program with the trap handler, load the program into dbx. Before you can catch the SIGFPE signal, you must add FPE to the dbx signal catch list.

(dbx) catch FPE

By default, FPE is on the ignore list.

Determining Where the Exception Occurred

After adding FPE to the catch list, run the program in dbx. When the exception you are trapping occurs, the SIGFPE signal is raised and dbx stops the program. Then you can trace the call stack using the dbx where command to help find the specific line number of the program where the exception occurs (see where Command).

Determining the Cause of the Exception

To determine the cause of the exception, use the regs -f command to display the floating point state register (FSR). Look at the accrued exception (aexc) and current exception (cexc) fields of the register, which contain bits for the following floating-point exception conditions:

For more information on the floating-point state register, see Version 8 (for V8) or Version 9 (for V9) of The SPARC Architecture Manual. For more discussion and examples, see the Numerical Computation Guide.