stabs

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For other uses, see stab.

stabs (sometimes written STABS) is a debugging data format for storing information about computer programs for use by symbolic and source-level debuggers. It "was apparently invented by Peter Kessler at the University of California, Berkeley" ^[1] for use with a Pascal compiler. At one stage it was widely used by Unix systems, but the newer DWARF format has largely supplanted stabs.

Since it was designed for use with the a.out format for object files, which has no provision for debugging information, this format encodes the information into special entries in the symbol table. (The name "stabs" is in effect short for symbol table entries.)