Cygwin GDB gives error 193 when trying to start program.

Question

When I attempt to debug a simple program with gdb on cygwin I get the following:

C:\Users\Benoit St-Pierre\workspace_cpp\cs454>gdb a.exe
GNU gdb 6.8.0.20080328-cvs (cygwin-special)
Copyright (C) 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&gt;
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  Type "show copying"
and "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "i686-pc-cygwin"...
(gdb) start
Breakpoint 1 at 0x401a51: file server.cc, line 207.
Starting program: /cygdrive/c/Users/Benoit St-Pierre/workspace_cpp/cs454/a.exe
Error creating process /cygdrive/c/Users/Benoit St-Pierre/workspace_cpp/cs454/a.exe, (error 193).

Where the error 193 is a ERROR_BAD_EXE_FORMAT.

The compiled application itself runs great and clients connect and interact with the application. I'm using cygwin 1.7 since I'm using the new getaddrinfo methods for setting up sockets. The application was compiled using gcc 3.4.4 with the following command:

g++ -g3 server.cc

Anyone have a clue what I might be doing wrong?

Answer 1

The problem is that you have space character in your path name. Move the file to a different directory and gdb will be able to start the process.