Debugging with GDB

• pwndbg

  9 6,755 9.5 Python

  Exploit Development and Reverse Engineering with GDB Made Easy

  

GDB is great. I definitely recommend checking out watchpoints as well, a very useful tool for monitoring how a variable changes over time.

GDB also has many good plugins - pwndbg has tons of features and UI improvements over stock GDB.

https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg

• gef

  15 6,499 8.4 Python

  GEF (GDB Enhanced Features) - a modern experience for GDB with advanced debugging capabilities for exploit devs & reverse engineers on Linux

Using vanilla GDB is painful. As a bit of a shameless plug I recommend you check out GEF[1]. It's a large python script that extends GDB to make it a lot better to use. Notably it shows a lot of the state automatically every time the inferior stops. It's oriented around reversing and exploit development, but it definitely doesn't have to be used that way.

[1] https://github.com/hugsy/gef

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• gdb-dashboard

  19 10,645 4.4 Python

  Modular visual interface for GDB in Python

I can't believe no one has mentioned `gdb-dashboard` [1] yet! I use it extensively. [2]

Beyond that, I have recently learned how to write custom pretty printers for GDB. This saves a lot of screen space. I should probably update [2] soon with those new techniques.

GDB is powerful, useful, and after getting my start in IDE debuggers, including Visual Studio, I struggle whenever I have to go back.

[1]: https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb-dashboard

[2]: https://gavinhoward.com/2020/12/my-development-environment-a...

Suggest a related project