So you want a stand-alone function that prints a stack trace with all of the features that gdb stack traces have and that doesn’t terminate your application. The answer is to automate the launch of gdb in a non-interactive mode to perform just the tasks that you want.
This is done by executing gdb in a child process, using fork(), and scripting it to display a stack-trace while your application waits for it to complete. This can be performed without the use of a core-dump and without aborting the application. I learned how to do this from looking at this question: How it’s better to invoke gdb from program to print it’s stacktrace?
The example posted with that question didn’t work for me exactly as written, so here’s my “fixed” version (I ran this on Ubuntu 9.04).
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <sys/wait.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/prctl.h>
void print_trace() {
char pid_buf[30];
sprintf(pid_buf, "%d", getpid());
char name_buf[512];
name_buf[readlink("/proc/self/exe", name_buf, 511)]=0;
prctl(PR_SET_PTRACER, PR_SET_PTRACER_ANY, 0, 0, 0);
int child_pid = fork();
if (!child_pid) {
dup2(2,1); // redirect output to stderr - edit: unnecessary?
execl("/usr/bin/gdb", "gdb", "--batch", "-n", "-ex", "thread", "-ex", "bt", name_buf, pid_buf, NULL);
abort(); /* If gdb failed to start */
} else {
waitpid(child_pid,NULL,0);
}
}
As shown in the referenced question, gdb provides additional options that you could use. For example, using “bt full” instead of “bt” produces an even more detailed report (local variables are included in the output). The manpages for gdb are kind of light, but complete documentation is available here.
Since this is based on gdb, the output includes demangled names, line-numbers, function arguments, and optionally even local variables. Also, gdb is thread-aware, so you should be able to extract some thread-specific metadata.
Here’s an example of the kind of stack traces that I see with this method.
0x00007f97e1fc2925 in waitpid () from /lib/libc.so.6
[Current thread is 0 (process 15573)]
#0 0x00007f97e1fc2925 in waitpid () from /lib/libc.so.6
#1 0x0000000000400bd5 in print_trace () at ./demo3b.cpp:496
2 0x0000000000400c09 in recursive (i=2) at ./demo3b.cpp:636
3 0x0000000000400c1a in recursive (i=1) at ./demo3b.cpp:646
4 0x0000000000400c1a in recursive (i=0) at ./demo3b.cpp:646
5 0x0000000000400c46 in main (argc=1, argv=0x7fffe3b2b5b8) at ./demo3b.cpp:70
Note: I found this to be incompatible with the use of valgrind (probably due to Valgrind’s use of a virtual machine). It also doesn’t work when you are running the program inside of a gdb session (can’t apply a second instance of “ptrace” to a process).