Dbx (debugger)

dbx is a source-level debugger found primarily on Solaris, AIX, IRIX, Tru64 UNIX, Linux and BSD operating systems. It provides symbolic debugging for programs written in C, C++, Fortran, Pascal and Java. Useful features include stepping through programs one source line or machine instruction at a time. In addition to simply viewing operation of the program, variables can be manipulated and a wide range of expressions can be evaluated and displayed.

dbx

Original author(s)	Mark Linton
Developer(s)	Oracle Corporation
Initial release	1981; 44 years ago (1981)
Operating system	Unix and Unix-like
Type	Debugger
License	Free for download and use as described in the Sun Studio product license.

History

dbx was originally developed at University of California, Berkeley, by Mark Linton during the years 1981–1984^[1] and subsequently made its way to various vendors who had licensed BSD.

Availability

dbx is provided with AIX,^[2] and was also provided with IRIX^[3] and Tru64 UNIX.^[4]

It is included as part of the Oracle Solaris Studio product from Oracle Corporation,^[5] and is supported on both Solaris and Linux. It supports programs compiled with the Oracle Solaris Studio compilers and GCC.

It is also available on IBM z/OS systems, in the UNIX System Services component.^[6] dbx for z/OS can debug programs written in C and C++, and can also perform machine level debugging. As of z/OS V1R5, dbx is able to debug programs using the DWARF debug format. z/OS V1R6 added support for debugging 64-bit programs.

GCC removed support for dbx in release 13.^[7]

See also

• Modular Debugger (mdb)
• GNU Debugger