In this section, we introduce two debugging tools: the GNU debugger (GDB), which is useful for examining a program’s runtime state, and Valgrind (pronounced "Val-grinned"), a popular code profiling suite. Specifically, we introduce Valgrind’s Memcheck tool, which analyzes a program’s memory accesses to detect invalid memory usage, uninitialized memory usage, and memory leaks.

The GDB section includes two sample GDB sessions that illustrate commonly used GDB commands for finding bugs in programs. We also discuss some advanced GDB features, including attaching GDB to a running process, GDB and Makefiles, signal control in GDB, debugging at the assembly code level, and debugging multithreaded Pthreads programs.

The Valgrind section discusses memory access errors and why they can be so difficult to detect. It also includes an example run of Memcheck on a program with some bad memory access errors. The Valgrind suite includes other program profiling and debugging tools, which we cover in later chapters. For example, we cover the cache profiling tool Cachegrind in Chapter 11, and the function call profiling tool Callgrind in Chapter 12.