I just thought I’d share a lesson I learned today:

I’ve been struggling for a long time at work with a gdb problem. When I set a break-point and then single-step from that point, it sometimes (often) decides to act as if I had done ‘continue‘ and not ‘next‘. It is highly annoying and makes debugging nasty problems really awkward.

Today I searched around for the topic and after some experiments I can now confirm: if I remove all uses of popen() I no longer get the problems! I found posts that indicated that forking could confuse threaded programs, and since this program at work uses threads I could immediately identify that it uses both popen() and system() and both of them use fork() internally. (And yes, I believe my removal of popen() also removed the system() calls.)

And now I can finally debug my crappy code again to become less crappy!

My work PC runs glibc 2.6.1, gcc 4.1.3 and gdb 6.6. But I doubt the specific versions matter much.