Showing posts with label bash debugger script languages. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bash debugger script languages. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Bash has a debugger

One of my biggest complaints with interpreted languages in general is that the debugging tools available are rather limited. When trying to find the root of a problem, having some sexy surgical tools available to cut into your program are nice. No, more than nice - sometimes they're necessary.

To my surprise, I discovered that Bash has a debugger! Bashdb, where have you been all my life? You can set breakpoints in your code, and step through the script line by line if desired. In terms of basic functionality, it's matches gdb fairly closely. Amazing!

I've used the PHP debugger XDebug before, but I found it to be a bit intrusive into the source code. You have to add PHP commands to the source to enable XDebug. I've never used Python or JS debuggers. Anyone know if good debuggers exist for those languages?