Re: More MacBugs

Bruce Carter (bcarter@mentor.idbsu.edu)
Sat, 30 Mar 1996 12:32:37 EST

At 8:06 AM 3/27/96, Ken Rohrer wrote:
>Thanks to those who responded on commands in MacBugs. One last question- I
>hope to use MacBugs to help me find the culprit(s) of various system errors
>that occur. Is there a fairly simple way to determine this by reading the
>strings that come up with MacBugs when a crash occurs? For example, I know
>that the author of Netscape Defrost used MacBugs to determine how Netscape
>was causing a crash and then made an extension to correct this. If I am
>asking too much from this program as a non-programmer, let me know.

There is a great deal of information that MacsBug (MacBugs is a game...
*heh*) can provide, but you would have to know at least something about
programming, memory management, and other technical issues to decipher that
information. Things like where the program counter pointer is, allocated
memory blocks, memory dumps, and other like things can be had and are often
useful when reporting bugs to vendors. You can also introduce breakpoints
and slow down the execution of the program for debugging purposes.

--
Bruce Carter, Instructional Software Designer     (208)385-1851@voice
Boise State University, Boise, ID  83725          (208)385-1856@fax
http://mentor.idbsu.edu/BruceCarter/home.html     bcarter@mentor.idbsu.edu