There is also strace. see man page for details. B-) On Monday 21 February 2005 12:16 pm, Jeff Pohlmeyer wrote:

...

More generally though ... how does one go about tracking down the cause of a Segmentation Fault?

First, install gdb ( if you don't have it. )

then you can just say: % gdb [name-of-program]

Keep in mind that firefox normally launches from a script, and gdb expects a binary. So in order to run the firefox binary, you could set up your own script, e.g.:

#!/bin/bash export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/your/path/to/firefox/ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME cd $MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME gdb ./firefox-bin

Then launch the script from an XTERM window, or whatever XFCE calls it.

Of course, you *should* completely read and understand the gdb documentation first, but if you hate reading docs as much as I do, the basic gdb nmemonic commands are:

r ( run - start the application ) bt ( backtrace - use this when you hit a segfault ) c ( continue - resume program execution ) k ( kill - terminate the application ) q ( quit - exit gdb )

-Jeff .

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