To set a breakpoint in a shared library, dbx needs to confirm 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 regardless of 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.