17.1. Conceptual Overview

A debugger is a program that lets you run a second program, which we will call the debuggee. The debugger lets you examine and change the state of the debuggee, and control its execution. In particular, you can single-step the program, executing one statement or instruction at a time, in order to watch the program's behavior.

Debuggers come in two flavors: instruction-level debuggers , which work at the level of machine instructions, and source-level debuggers , which operate in terms of your program's source code and programming language. The latter are considerably easier to use, and usually can do machine-level debugging if necessary. GDB is a source level debugger; it is probably the most widely applicable debugger (portable to the largest number of architectures) of any current debugger.