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8 Examining the Stack

When your program has stopped, the first thing you need to know is where it stopped and how it got there.

Each time your program performs a function call, information about the call is generated. That information includes the location of the call in your program, the arguments of the call, and the local variables of the function being called. The information is saved in a block of data called a stack frame. The stack frames are allocated in a region of memory called the call stack.

When your program stops, the ROCGDB commands for examining the stack allow you to see all of this information.

One of the stack frames is selected by ROCGDB and many ROCGDB commands refer implicitly to the selected frame. In particular, whenever you ask ROCGDB for the value of a variable in your program, the value is found in the selected frame. There are special ROCGDB commands to select whichever frame you are interested in. See Selecting a Frame.

When your program stops, ROCGDB automatically selects the currently executing frame and describes it briefly, similar to the frame command (see Information about a Frame).