I’m sure everyone already knows about this, but it’s such a nice feature I’ll post it anyway.
There’s a set of macros for gdb, described in a comment on this page, that will let you attach to a running python program using gdb and inspect its python call stack and python objects using the familiar interface of gdb. I’m a complete stranger to python and couldn’t figure out how to enable the python debugger, and it would get me lost even if I managed to enable it. Additionally I was trying to find out when and why a python program uses a particular syscall and I’m not sure the python debugger can help with this. For the record that python program blocks all signals so I couldn’t just send it a signal and have it print the stack.
I’m wondering if you can do the same thing with Java, and who’ll be the first to implement the gdb macros. I’ve not coded java for years but it makes me want to have a look at it again considering there’s source code for it now (I just wish I had the time). How about swi-prolog?
Practical note: For this to work you will need to rebuild python with debug information in. If you’re on Gentoo, whose default package manager uses python, and if you still have python2.4 installed, if you screw up your python2.5 installation, you can revive emerge by running it implicitly with python2.4 (python2.4 /usr/bin/emerge blah blah). To rebuild python with custom options, edit /usr/portage/dev-lang/python/python-2.5.2-r8.ebuild to add –with-pydebug, and run ebuild /usr/portage/dev-lang/python/python-2.5.2-r8.ebuild digest unpack, then edit /var/tmp/portage/dev-lang/python-2.5.2-r8/work/Python-2.5.2/Objects/unicodeobject.c to remove the assert on line 372, which seems to be a typo, and then ebuild /usr/portage/dev-lang/python/python-2.5.2-r8.ebuild compile install qmerge to let it finish. You may need to re-emerge some of the packages that have installed into /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages) for your program to work again.
Account of my unadventures 