[Wine] Re: Bash Script Shorcuts for Steam Games

[SpawnHappyJake]

Well Martin, this has been a learning experience for me. I quickly read the gdb man page (got some homework to do). It wasn't that long of a read. Not compared to my religion reading  [Wink]

I ran Portal and attached gdb to hl2.exe. Portal froze. I tried the "c" for continuing hl2.exe in gdb in terminal, and this did unfreeze Portal for a bit, but once I clicked "load" in Portal, the debugger says it gets a segmentation fault, and Portal freezes. I quit gdb with "q", and Portal unfreezes.

One time I tried either "step" or "next" instead of "c", can't remember which, and it froze my whole system, except for the mouse. Had to use the power button. Interesting.

Anyways, from my lay-man's perspective, I thought that, for example, running a Windows program in WINE in terminal and getting that log was "running a debugger" because you got lots of info about was was going on, especially when a bug happens, thus is a "debugger." I thought gdb would give something similar. But it looks like there is logging, and there is debuging. And that some programs have features put in that are accessed only by a debugger, even after compilation, is a new insight to me - thanks, Martin.

I knew that when writting a program in an IDE there are several debugging tools available to you, such as stoping at certain lines and seeing what variables equal at different times. But that's with source code. I didn't know that something similar could be done with a compiled program, like this hl2.exe.

I went here: http://cs.baylor.edu/~donahoo/tools/gdb/tutorial.html, and learned a few things. But the examples they give only work because gdb has both the source code and the compiled program. We don't have the source code for hl2.exe, so how is this working? Also, I noticed that you can run "wine" through gdb at terminal, but not "firefox". Is it just a matter of some compiled programs supporting debugging, and other not?

And I noticed that Program Files\Steam\dumps has several crash_hl2.exe_[date and time]_1.dmp files. And they sure don't open in gedit. I did notice in the gdb man page that gdb has an option to use core dump files. gdb -c [steam dump file] made gdb say that it wasn't a core dump file. It said that the file format is not recognized, which is what it says when I try to run FireFox through gdb. I just thought that was an interesting coincidence and should share it. It's probably still related to debugging hl2.exe.

Jake