A few days ago, I installed the newest 64-bit gdb program (version 7.7.1) on Solaris 10 (X86_64 platform) to debug programs. After playing with the gdb a day, I found 2 issues about gdb:(1) The "set follow-fork-mode child" command doesn't take effect. By default, after the parent process forks the child process, the gdb will track the parent process, so this command can make gdb begin to follow the child process. But this command works OK on Linux.(2) The gdb can't parse the 32-bit application core dump file. Per my understanding, the 64-bit gdb should parse both 32-bit and 64-bit core dump fi...

During the last 4 months, I was disturbed by a memory-corruption bug, and this bug will cause program crash. Until last Monday, I found the root cause and fixed it. This debug process is a difficult but memorable experience, so I will share it in this article. My program works as a SMS Hub. When it receives a SMS, it will allocate a structure in heap memory like this:typedef struct{ ...... int *a[8]; ......} info;After processing the SMS, the program will free the memory, and send the SMS to the next Hub or Operator.  Since last November, the program will crash som...

Shell is also called command line interface, it is the interface between *nix users and computer. Shell is a program which provides service to access OS kernel services.This article is to introduce some not so well known but useful and interesting knowledge about shell.Wikishell was born almost at the same time as Unix. The first UNIX shell was written by Ken Thompson in 1971 and its name is Thompson sh. It's older than Linux kernel.The default Shell in most *nix and MacOS is bash, bash was created by Brian Fox in 1987, the full name is Bourne Again shell(bash).There are other shells except ba...