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I am debugging a C++ program. Suppose I am sitting at a breakpoint in gdb and I do bt 50. This will generate the backtrace and show me the call stack with 50 functions that were run in the process of execution reaching where it is now.

Sometimes, I want to quickly examine the code for one of the functions in the backtrace call stack. I know how to do this on Visual Studio. Visual Studio maintains call stack similar to gdb backtrace. On Visual Studio, I can simply double-click a function in the call stack and Visual Studio takes me to the code for that function, even opening the file for me if not opened. Very convenient.

I was wondering if there was a gdb command to show code around a symbol name in backtrace. Currently, the only way I know is to manually find the file and open it in emacs, and then do a search in emacs to take me to the function. Please tell me if there is a better way so it becomes convenient like in Visual Studio.

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There are several choices, depending on how you are running gdb.

One simple way is to run gdb inside emacs. You can use M-x gdb (or M-x gud-gdb, which is a bit more old-school) to do this. When running gdb in emacs, simply selecting a frame will cause the source to be visited in emacs, and point will move to the line in question. "Selecting a frame" can be done via the up, down, and frame commands.

If you're running gdb outside of emacs, and want to continue doing this, then there are still options.

One approach is the edit command. Make sure to set your EDITOR environment variable to use emacsclient and set up emacs to respond to this (like M-x server-start).

Then in gdb, select some frame and you can see that frame's source with edit *$pc.

Another approach that some people like is to use the gdb "tui". This is a curses-based interface that shows the source in the terminal.

Yet another approach is to use one of the many gdb GUIs.

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