Debugging with GDB (September 2007)

328 Debugging with GDB
gdb-gdb-199991101/glob
source for the gnu filename pattern-matching subroutine
gdb-gdb-199991101/mmalloc
source for the gnu memory-mapped malloc package
The simplest way to configure and build GDB is to run configure from the
‘gdb-version-number ’ source directory, which in this example is the ‘gdb-gdb-199991101’
directory.
First switch to the ‘gdb-version-number ’ source directory if you are not already in it;
then run configure. Pass the identifier for the platform on which GDB will run as an
argument.
For example:
cd gdb-gdb-199991101
./configure host
make
where host is an identifier such as ‘sun4’ or ‘decstation’, that identifies the platform where
GDB will run. (You can often leave off host; configure tries to guess the correct value by
examining your system.)
Running ‘configure host ’ and then running make builds the ‘bfd’, ‘readline’,
‘mmalloc’, and ‘libiberty’ libraries, then gdb itself. The configured source files, and the
binaries, are left in the corresponding source directories.
configure is a Bourne-shell (/bin/sh) script; if your system does not recognize this
automatically when you run a different shell, you may need to run sh on it explicitly:
sh configure host
If you run configure from a directory that contains source directories for multiple
libraries or programs, such as the ‘gdb-gdb-199991101’ source directory for version gdb-
199991101, configure creates configuration files for every directory level underneath (unless
you tell it not to, with the ‘--norecursion’ option).
You can run the configure script from any of the subordinate directories in the GDB
distribution if you only want to configure that subdirectory, but be sure to s pe cify a path
to it.
For example, with version gdb-199991101, type the following to configure only the bfd
subdirectory:
cd gdb-gdb-199991101/bfd
../configure host
You can install gdb anywhere; it has no hardwired paths. However, you should make
sure that the shell on your path (named by the ‘SHELL’ environment variable) is publicly
readable. Remember that GDB uses the shell to start your program—some systems refuse
to let GDB debug child proc es ses whose programs are not readable.
A.1 Compiling GDB in another directory
If you want to run GDB versions for several host or target machines, you need a different
gdb compiled for each combination of host and target. configure is designed to make this