Postmortem Debugging
Overview
Note: This section applies only to OS/2 local
debugging.
Postmortem debugging is intended to help you isolate the
causes of unanticipated traps or OS/2 exceptions, in programs
that are already in production or widespread use. The stages of
the postmortem debugging process are:
- You ship the ITRAPPER
utility along with your application.
- After the end user has experienced a trap or
unanticipated OS/2 exception, or in anticipation of such
a problem, they reload the application under ITRAPPER.
This utility has no effect on the running application.
However, if the application traps or throws an unhandled
exception, ITRAPPER takes control and writes relevant
information to a dump file, using compression algorithms
to minimize the dump file size. If the failure causing
the trap was an OS/2 exception, the program continues
running. If the cause was a trap, the program terminates.
A separate dump file is created for each exception or
trap. The end user ships you the dump files created by
ITRAPPER.
- You debug the dump file instead of a live object file.
Because the dump file contains information about the
state of the application at the time of the trap or
exception, and is not a live object file, only a subset
of debugger features are available. For example, you can
view memory and register contents, but you cannot step or
run the program or set breakpoints.