NAME¶

Devel::bt - Automatic gdb backtraces on errors

SYNOPSIS¶

    $ perl -d:bt -MB -e'(bless \(my $o = 0), q{B::SV})->REFCNT'
    #0  0x00007f9c3215ab0e in __libc_waitpid (pid=<value optimized out>, stat_loc=0x7fff4c5ffbe8, options=<value optimized out>) at ../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/waitpid.c:32
    #1  0x00007f9c319168c1 in backtrace () at bt.xs:129
    #2  0x00007f9c319168ec in sighandler (sig=11) at bt.xs:135
    #3  <signal handler called>
    #4  0x00007f9c316c8ccf in XS_B__SV_REFCNT (my_perl=0x151c010, cv=0x177bfb8) at B.c:3360
    #5  0x000000000057d5a0 in Perl_pp_entersub (my_perl=0x151c010) at pp_hot.c:2882
    #6  0x000000000051a331 in Perl_runops_debug (my_perl=0x151c010) at dump.c:2049
    #7  0x0000000000454ab0 in S_run_body (my_perl=0x151c010, oldscope=1) at perl.c:2308
    #8  0x0000000000453d78 in perl_run (my_perl=0x151c010) at perl.c:2233
    #9  0x00000000004230fd in main (argc=6, argv=0x7fff4c600788, env=0x7fff4c6007c0) at perlmain.c:117

DESCRIPTION¶

This module, when enabled, registers a handler for certain types of fatal errors, like segmentation faults, and, once such an error occurs, prints a debugger backtrace to standard output before exiting the program.

It is intended to be used to debug crashes in situations where running the failing program directly under a debugger is not possible, for example when trying to get more information from cpantesters or from users unfamiliar with gdb.

HOW IT WORKS¶

When being imported, a signal handler for the following signals is registered:

• "SIGILL"
• "SIGFPE"
• "SIGBUS"
• "SIGSEGV"
• "SIGTRAP"
• "SIGABRT"
• "SIGQUIT"

Once the program causes an error that results in one of the above signals being sent to it, the signal handler will be called, and fork off a process running "gdb" and generating a backtrace of the running program, which will then be printed to standard output.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS¶

This software is based on parts of "glib", which is written by:

• Peter Mattis <petm@xcf.berkeley.edu>
• Spencer Kimball <spencer@xcf.berkeley.edu>
• Josh MacDonald <jmacd@xcf.berkeley.edu>
• Shawn T. Amundson <amundson@gimp.org>
• Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>
• Raja R Harinath <harinath@cs.umn.edu>
• Tim Janik <timj@gtk.org>
• Elliot Lee <sopwith@redhat.com>
• Tor Lillqvist <tml@iki.fi>
• Paolo Molaro <lupus@debian.org>
• Havoc Pennington <hp@pobox.com>
• Manish Singh <yosh@gimp.org>
• Owen Taylor <otaylor@gtk.org>
• Sebastian Wilhelmi <wilhelmi@ira.uka.de>
• and others

"glib" is licensed under The GNU Lesser General Public License, Version 2.

AUTHOR¶

Florian Ragwitz <rafl@debian.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE¶

This software is Copyright (c) 2012 by Florian Ragwitz.

This is free software, licensed under:

  The GNU Lesser General Public License, Version 2.1, February 1999