C++ Eclipse debugger: "Cannot find bounds of current function" and doesn't stop at breakpoints

Question

I am using Ubuntu for one of the first times and eclipse's debugger has given me more trouble than I can deal with. For the moment I just want to try to figure out how to get the "Cannot find bounds of current function" to stop so I can see where my flow of control goes awry.

I know this is a vague question, but I'm willing to quickly supply any sort of information necessary. I've been googling info for about 2 hours and switching on and off different things to no avail.

I'm using Version: 3.4.1 (I believe the newest one)

Also, my breakpoints won't always works (probably about a 25% success rate) even when I set them before the build. My cout<< or printf also can't print before the programs blows up. This makes me think it's some sort of concurrent process that is outpacing the debugger, but I have no idea how to fix this.

I would greatly appreciate any help. I'll be around.

Answer 1

Not an unheard-of problem

I suppose you can confirm that:

• all the shared libraries are compiled with -g flag (debug) ?
• and the output application binary file seems to be ok because it runs correctly in command line ?
• you are not compiling with some framwework (like Qt4) which would require qmake to be run to generate the project file to which you add "CONFIG += qt debug" ?
• you have no warning of any kind during the build ? (like this "Clock skew detected" message)

---

The point of all this is:

Somewhere, one of the libs or your own program do not have "debug" information in it.

The -g flag can be set directly in the makefile (and is not particularly dependent of the OS in this instance).

Example (not targeted for Linux)

CXX = g++
CXXFLAGS =  -O2 -Wno-deprecated -g
DEFINES = -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -DLITTLE_ENDIAN

##########################

COMPILE=$(CXX) $(CXXFLAGS) $(DEFINES)
LINK=$(CXX)

UNRAR_OBJ=filestr.o recvol.o rs.o scantree.o

OBJECTS=rar.o strlist.o strfn.o pathfn.o

.cpp.o:
    $(COMPILE) -D$(WHAT) -c -g $<

all:    unrar

clean:
    @rm -f *.o *.bak *~

unrar:    WHAT=UNRAR
unrar:    $(OBJECTS) $(UNRAR_OBJ)
    @rm -f makeunrar
    $(LINK) -Wl,-s -g -o unrar $(LDFLAGS) $(OBJECTS)
$(UNRAR_OBJ) $(LIBS)   

sfx:    WHAT=SFX_MODULE
sfx:    $(OBJECTS)
    @rm -f default.sfx
    $(LINK) -Wl,-s -g -o default.sfx $(LDFLAGS)
$(OBJECTS) -DSFX_MODULE

g++ -O2 -Wno-deprecated -g  -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64
-D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -DLITTLE_ENDIAN -DUNRAR -c -g
rar.cpp
[...]
g++ -Wl,-s -g -o unrar  rar.o strlist.o ...

Here, that makefile contains a huge trap:

g++ -Wl,-s -o unrar  rar.o strlist.o ...

-s stands for "strip" meaning all the debug informations generated before are lost in the final output. So do check also your link options.