Strace equivalent for Windows

While searching for a debug tool equivalent of strace that runs on Windows, I’ve come across Process Monitor. This appears to work well for me. For anyone in search of strace equivalent on Windows, give this one a try.

I’ve also tried StraceNT, but this one was not very reliable as it tends to crash the traced process almost every time.

An equally useful tool for debugging on Windows is DebugView, which captures output from the OutputDebugString calls.

Setting break point where an exception is thrown

Caolan told me today that when debugging with gdb, you can actually set a break point right before an exception is thrown.

You can do

gdb ./soffice.bin
(gdb) catch throw
(gdb) run

and gdb breaks at every location where an exception is raised. Or, you can set a normal break point, run catch throw and cont, and gdb will break at the next exception throw event. This technique helps when an exception gets caught somewhere at higher level in the call stack and you are trying to find out where exactly it is thrown. Such task, without this technique, would be very time-consuming, tedious, boring, and at times frustrating especially when you’ve spent hours and still don’t have the location of the thrown exception.

Similarly, you can also break where an exception is caught, with catch catch command, or you can catch a whole set of other events with this construct.

The only drawback with this catch event construct is that, it breaks at every single exception raised or caught, which, inside OOo’s codebase can be quite substantial in some places. Nonetheless, this is a very useful technique to add to your debugging arsenal.