Question

I am trying to debug a service. The usual procedure is to start the service and attach gdb to the process. But I want to debug the code when the service is still starting up. It takes a while for gdb to load the libraries, and the required code has executed before I can put the breakpoints. Any idea how to do it? Thanks!

Answer 1

Let’s assume your service is called “myservice.exe”

If you can get on the box that the code is actually running on, then I would do the following:

$ gdb myservice.exe
(gdb) break myclass:myfunction
(gdb) run

This should get you what you want.

Note: if you can’t run gdb directly, then put a “sleep” statement for 1 minute at the very start (before the part you want to debug) – that should allow you to connect before it starts the sensitive code.