1 Summary of the GNU Make Debugger

The purpose of a debugger such as the GNU Make debugger is to allow you to see what is going on “inside” the GNU Make debugger when it processes a Makefile.

The GNU Remake debugger can do four main kinds of things (plus other things in support of these) to help you catch bugs in the act:

• Have GNU Remake stop at specified places such as targets.
• Examine what has happened, when GNU Remake has stopped or encounters an error.
• Change the internal state of things inside GNU Remake, so you can experiment with correcting the effects of one bug and go on to discover another.

Although you can use the the GNU Make debugger to debug Makefiles, it can also be used just as a front-end for learning more about Makefiles and writing them with GNU Remake.

A degenerate and less-interactive form of debugging is tracing in which one passively watches some of the steps that go on in processing a Makefile.