I wanted to write this myself for a long time but what prevented me from doing so was the fact that I had come up with a trivial shell/awk script that achieved almost the same goal. Since that little program was useful for someone other than me, I thought I’d polish it slightly and post it here.

This tool’s original intent was to print a call graph from a given program. It works by taking control of GDB and automatically setting breakpoints at each function call. Of course, the executable must include debugging symbols (that is, it must have been compiled with gcc’s -g option). Here’s some sample output (the format is: caller callee arguments):

xmltree_parse xmltree_itor_next (self=0x80571e8)
xmltree_itor_next xmlnode_stack_push (stack=0x80571f0, n=0x8056780)
xmltree_parse h_requires (n=0x8056808, u=0xbff9d504)
h_requires xmlnode_get_attr (self=0x8056808, name=0x80520ea "plugin")
h_requires probe_get_name (self=0x8056af0)
h_requires htab_lookup (self=0x8058100, key=0x8056868, len=3, create=0, value=0x0)


You can use the included cg2dot.awk script to produce files suitable for processing with graphviz.

This library used an undocumented (at the time) glibc function called backtrace(3) which would return memory locations but not function names. Today, browsing old source code, I reviewed the library and was glad to see that backtrace(3) is currently not only documented but it also offers the same features my library did, so I won’t be updating Libbtrace anymore.

This is GPLed software written in Delphi and although binaries are only available for Windows I had no problem running it under Linux using Wine.

darcs get http://darcs.superadditive.com/smf-mimetex