bash debugger / News: Recent posts

pydb version 1.13 -Post-mortem debugging and debugging from calling inside a program have been improved and docuemented. Various bugs have been fixed and a number documentation corrections/additions have been made. A Unix Manual page has been added. The jump in version number is to be consistent with the Debian numbering of an older version of this program.

ddd 3.3.12-test4 corrects some bugs and makes use of the new pydb features and corrections.

This release of pydb adds gdb display expressions, a pure exec restart, a help/info subcommand system, and many gdb commands. Changes were made to make it possible to use ddd as a frontend to this debugger. However ddd 3.3.12-test3 released at the same time is needed.

A lot of important changes were made and changes that will facilitate growth and increase stability. The ability to do non-interactive POSIX-shell line tracing was added. Documentation was added and is greatly revised from pdb.py. Regression tests were added. Much more information can be found in the NEWS file that comes with the distribution.

Showing which command on a line with multiple commmands (broken in bash 3.0) now works again in the 3.1 release.

A dynamically loadable routine was added which speeds up initial loading of large scripts, e.g. "configure" scripts, greatly. GNU emacs lisp is now compiled and a small bug where we were reporting script sizes one too large has been fixed.

Tracing/debugging now sets shell tracing. On error, the target call stack is shown by default. The prompt has been changed to show the target and dependencies. Quitting from recursive invocation has been improved. The help command has been reorganized to be more gdb-like and ddd-friendly. Patches from cygwin and GNU/Linux and features from GNU Make 3.81 were incorporated. Note that the prompt and Emacs lisp command have been changed from makedb to mdb to avoid confusion with another Unix command. If you were using ddd-3.3.12-test you will need to get a newer version.

This release of the GNU Make + debugger is timed with a test release ddd-3.3.12-test (found in this project) that now supports GNU Makefile debugging and makes use of the features not found in previous GNU Make + debugger releases.

A number of usability changes, bug fixes, code cleanup, and documentation corrections were done to the GNU Make + debugger. Errors in the "eval" command no longer cause termination. "Next" and "Step" commands now do different things, "step" being more fine grained. A number of improvements were made to the "target" command. "breakpoints" work more like gdb now. ... read more

In this release, I think the GNU Make debugger starts to get real. Try it out! Or better, contribute! See the NEWS and ChangeLog for detailed information as to what's gone on.

This release makes installation easier. No functional changes to the debugger proper have been made.

A "port" of the bashdb debugger from the 2.05b series now works for bash 3.0.

An optional but useful patch for bash 3.0 is needed to get the BASH_COMMAND (the command to be executed) working.

Other than that, there is one slight regression in function over the bash 2.05b debugger in that in the standalone bashdb script, the parameters given to the script no longer appear in a traceback. They do however appear when running via bash --debugger

Some fixes in code, debugger, configuration and documentation

- Autostuff improvements
- fixes to make Cygwin, OS X and AIX builds
- configurable package and executable names
- Allow modification the philosophical parts the bashdb reference
manual to placate Matthias Klose and presumably Debian folks
- Bug: a comment line in the history was taken as a timestamp and we
dumped core. Non-timestamp comment lines should appear in the history now.
- Bug: was not expanding source filename in debugger the correct way.
- Mention HISTTIMEFORMAT in bash.1
- Add bashdb manual page.
- Changes to allow building outside of source tree.
- Add Debian bash 2.05b patches provided by Matthias Klose.

Version 0.41

- line number in multi-line assignments had been the line number where
the assignment ends, not the beginning. Thus assignments with
backticked subshells gave the wrong line number.
- V (info variables) command working thanks to Mikael Andersson
- Add "help show <command>" and "help info <command>"
- More global variables start out _Dbg_ now
- Add long overdue THANKS... read more

history now is timestamped. Can be very helpful in tracking down when someone has hacked into your system. Use environment variable HISTTIMEFORMAT to customize using strftime specifiers.

Bugfix:: Was not finding source file if we did a cd in the debugged script and the source file name was relative. Expand source file names.

Patched ddd removed as that is now a separate package

If you use the ddd front-end you should probably get this release along with ddd-3.3.4 from here. Breakpoint handling in ddd has works althought there are still some ddd - bashdb interaction bugs.

file names are now canonicalized internally.

A bugfix release. Debugging through scripts where the IFS was changed caused problems. There had been problems changing the debugger global state when stopped inside a subshell.

Some small changes to facilitate portability to other shells.

Another line number bug fixed. Restarting now saves debugger environment (such as breakpoints). Bash public patches 0001-0004 ahve been added. Misc bugs and doc fixes

Some small bugs fixed. Subshells are now shown in parenthesis and quit now exits nested subshells.

Many bugs fixed. Regression tests work on FreeBSD and Mac OSX (as well as Linux and Solaris). Some documentation changes and changes to make interaction with DDD work better. "debug" command works better. Now show the command to get executed on a multi-command line.

Thanks to sourceforge.net for hosting and supplying the compile farm to test this.

See debugger/NEWS for for more information.

Version 0.32 fixes some long-standing problems with wrong line numbers and some other bugs as well. It also adds a couple new features that I think will be of benefit to many people, including patches to ddd to support bash and a useful examine ("x") similar to Perl5's debugger. If you upgrade infrequently, this is probably a version you should get.

If you ever need to debug bash code, configure scripts or understand RedHat's init scripts with their many source includes, this is the debugger for you. At this point, bashdb should be fairly stable.

This project provides patched sources to bash that enable better debugging support as well as improved error reporting. In addition, this project contains the most comprehensive source-code debugger for bash that has been written. This is a bugfix release.

A couple of bugs fixed. Added gdb's "finish" or perl5db's "return" command. History commands more closely match gdb's and perl5db's. See news file for details.... read more

Has been used to modify (and patch around) configure scripts!

Some bugs fixed. Some more filling out completed.

As always, we're looking for folks to help out.

Recent changes:

- Fix bug in "make uninstall"

- $? is saved and preserved for use inside "eval", "print", watch, and display, break and action expresions.

- Can also now refer to $1, $2, ... in expressions mentioned above

- debug level (the number of times we are nested in debugger) is now
shown in prompt via new exported variable BASHDB_LEVEL.

- Implement "skip" command. (Don't run next command.) Integrate this into
"debug" command... read more

BASH Debugger provides a patched BASH that enables better debugging support as well as improved error reporting. It also contains the most comprehensive source code debugger for BASH that has been written. It can be used as a springboard for other experimental features (such as adding hashtables), since development is maintained openly and developers are encouraged to participate..

For more information on BASH see http://bashdb.sourceforge.net