Dbx debugger

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The correct title of this article is dbx debugger. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

dbx is a popular, Unix-based source-level debugger found primarily on Solaris, AIX, IRIX, and BSD Unix systems. It provides symbolic debugging for programs written in C, C++, Pascal, and Fortran. Useful features include stepping through programs one source line or machine instruction at a time. In addition to simply viewing operation of the program, variables can be manipulated and a wide range of expressions can be evaluated and displayed.

dbx was originally developed at UC Berkeley by Mark Linton and subsequently made its way to various vendors who had licensed BSD Unix. Since then it has evolved differently. For example:

dbx is also available on IBM z/OS systems, in the UNIX System Services component. dbx for z/OS can debug programs written in C and C++. It can also perform machine level debugging. As of z/OS V1R5, dbx is able to debug programs using the DWARF debug format. z/OS V1R6 added support for debugging 64-bit programs.

dbx is included as part of the Sun Studio product from Sun Microsystems. Sun Studio runs on Solaris, and many of the tools (including dbx) also run on Linux. The dbx in Sun Studio supports programs compiled with the Sun Studio compilers as well as programs compiled with gcc and g++.