You can try using a "catchpoint" (catch throw
) to stop the debugger at the point where the exception is generated.
The following excerpt From the gdb manual describes the catchpoint feature.
5.1.3 Setting catchpoints
You can use catchpoints to cause the debugger to stop for certain kinds of program events, such as C++ exceptions or the loading of a shared library. Use the catch command to set a catchpoint.
catch event
Stop when event occurs. event can be any of the following:
throw
The throwing of a C++ exception.
catch
The catching of a C++ exception.
exec
A call to exec. This is currently only available for HP-UX.
fork
A call to fork. This is currently only available for HP-UX.
vfork
A call to vfork. This is currently only available for HP-UX.
load or load libname
The dynamic loading of any shared library, or the loading of the library libname. This is currently only available for HP-UX.
unload or unload libname
The unloading of any dynamically loaded shared library, or the unloading of the library libname. This is currently only available for HP-UX.
tcatch event
Set a catchpoint that is enabled only for one stop. The catchpoint is automatically deleted after the first time the event is caught.
Use the info break
command to list the current catchpoints.
There are currently some limitations to C++ exception handling (catch throw and catch catch) in GDB:
If you call a function interactively, GDB normally returns control to you when the function has finished executing. If the call raises an exception, however, the call may bypass the mechanism that returns control to you and cause your program either to abort or to simply continue running until it hits a breakpoint, catches a signal that GDB is listening for, or exits. This is the case even if you set a catchpoint for the exception; catchpoints on exceptions are disabled within interactive calls.
You cannot raise an exception interactively.
You cannot install an exception handler interactively.
Sometimes catch is not the best way to debug exception handling: if you need to know exactly where an exception is raised, it is better to stop before the exception handler is called, since that way you can see the stack before any unwinding takes place. If you set a breakpoint in an exception handler instead, it may not be easy to find out where the exception was raised.
To stop just before an exception handler is called, you need some knowledge of the implementation. In the case of GNU C++, exceptions are raised by calling a library function named __raise_exception which has the following ANSI C interface:
/* addr is where the exception identifier is stored.
id is the exception identifier. */
void __raise_exception (void **addr, void *id);
To make the debugger catch all exceptions before any stack unwinding takes place, set a breakpoint on __raise_exception (see section Breakpoints; watchpoints; and exceptions).
With a conditional breakpoint (see section Break conditions) that depends on the value of id, you can stop your program when a specific exception is raised. You can use multiple conditional breakpoints to stop your program when any of a number of exceptions are raised.
In simple terms, a stack trace is a list of the method calls that the application was in the middle of when an Exception was thrown.
Simple Example
With the example given in the question, we can determine exactly where the exception was thrown in the application. Let's have a look at the stack trace:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.example.myproject.Book.getTitle(Book.java:16)
at com.example.myproject.Author.getBookTitles(Author.java:25)
at com.example.myproject.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:14)
This is a very simple stack trace. If we start at the beginning of the list of "at ...", we can tell where our error happened. What we're looking for is the topmost method call that is part of our application. In this case, it's:
at com.example.myproject.Book.getTitle(Book.java:16)
To debug this, we can open up Book.java
and look at line 16
, which is:
15 public String getTitle() {
16 System.out.println(title.toString());
17 return title;
18 }
This would indicate that something (probably title
) is null
in the above code.
Example with a chain of exceptions
Sometimes applications will catch an Exception and re-throw it as the cause of another Exception. This typically looks like:
34 public void getBookIds(int id) {
35 try {
36 book.getId(id); // this method it throws a NullPointerException on line 22
37 } catch (NullPointerException e) {
38 throw new IllegalStateException("A book has a null property", e)
39 }
40 }
This might give you a stack trace that looks like:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IllegalStateException: A book has a null property
at com.example.myproject.Author.getBookIds(Author.java:38)
at com.example.myproject.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:14)
Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.example.myproject.Book.getId(Book.java:22)
at com.example.myproject.Author.getBookIds(Author.java:36)
... 1 more
What's different about this one is the "Caused by". Sometimes exceptions will have multiple "Caused by" sections. For these, you typically want to find the "root cause", which will be one of the lowest "Caused by" sections in the stack trace. In our case, it's:
Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException <-- root cause
at com.example.myproject.Book.getId(Book.java:22) <-- important line
Again, with this exception we'd want to look at line 22
of Book.java
to see what might cause the NullPointerException
here.
More daunting example with library code
Usually stack traces are much more complex than the two examples above. Here's an example (it's a long one, but demonstrates several levels of chained exceptions):
javax.servlet.ServletException: Something bad happened
at com.example.myproject.OpenSessionInViewFilter.doFilter(OpenSessionInViewFilter.java:60)
at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157)
at com.example.myproject.ExceptionHandlerFilter.doFilter(ExceptionHandlerFilter.java:28)
at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157)
at com.example.myproject.OutputBufferFilter.doFilter(OutputBufferFilter.java:33)
at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157)
at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler.handle(ServletHandler.java:388)
at org.mortbay.jetty.security.SecurityHandler.handle(SecurityHandler.java:216)
at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.SessionHandler.handle(SessionHandler.java:182)
at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandler.handle(ContextHandler.java:765)
at org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext.handle(WebAppContext.java:418)
at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerWrapper.handle(HandlerWrapper.java:152)
at org.mortbay.jetty.Server.handle(Server.java:326)
at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection.handleRequest(HttpConnection.java:542)
at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection$RequestHandler.content(HttpConnection.java:943)
at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpParser.parseNext(HttpParser.java:756)
at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpParser.parseAvailable(HttpParser.java:218)
at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection.handle(HttpConnection.java:404)
at org.mortbay.jetty.bio.SocketConnector$Connection.run(SocketConnector.java:228)
at org.mortbay.thread.QueuedThreadPool$PoolThread.run(QueuedThreadPool.java:582)
Caused by: com.example.myproject.MyProjectServletException
at com.example.myproject.MyServlet.doPost(MyServlet.java:169)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:727)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:820)
at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHolder.handle(ServletHolder.java:511)
at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1166)
at com.example.myproject.OpenSessionInViewFilter.doFilter(OpenSessionInViewFilter.java:30)
... 27 more
Caused by: org.hibernate.exception.ConstraintViolationException: could not insert: [com.example.myproject.MyEntity]
at org.hibernate.exception.SQLStateConverter.convert(SQLStateConverter.java:96)
at org.hibernate.exception.JDBCExceptionHelper.convert(JDBCExceptionHelper.java:66)
at org.hibernate.id.insert.AbstractSelectingDelegate.performInsert(AbstractSelectingDelegate.java:64)
at org.hibernate.persister.entity.AbstractEntityPersister.insert(AbstractEntityPersister.java:2329)
at org.hibernate.persister.entity.AbstractEntityPersister.insert(AbstractEntityPersister.java:2822)
at org.hibernate.action.EntityIdentityInsertAction.execute(EntityIdentityInsertAction.java:71)
at org.hibernate.engine.ActionQueue.execute(ActionQueue.java:268)
at org.hibernate.event.def.AbstractSaveEventListener.performSaveOrReplicate(AbstractSaveEventListener.java:321)
at org.hibernate.event.def.AbstractSaveEventListener.performSave(AbstractSaveEventListener.java:204)
at org.hibernate.event.def.AbstractSaveEventListener.saveWithGeneratedId(AbstractSaveEventListener.java:130)
at org.hibernate.event.def.DefaultSaveOrUpdateEventListener.saveWithGeneratedOrRequestedId(DefaultSaveOrUpdateEventListener.java:210)
at org.hibernate.event.def.DefaultSaveEventListener.saveWithGeneratedOrRequestedId(DefaultSaveEventListener.java:56)
at org.hibernate.event.def.DefaultSaveOrUpdateEventListener.entityIsTransient(DefaultSaveOrUpdateEventListener.java:195)
at org.hibernate.event.def.DefaultSaveEventListener.performSaveOrUpdate(DefaultSaveEventListener.java:50)
at org.hibernate.event.def.DefaultSaveOrUpdateEventListener.onSaveOrUpdate(DefaultSaveOrUpdateEventListener.java:93)
at org.hibernate.impl.SessionImpl.fireSave(SessionImpl.java:705)
at org.hibernate.impl.SessionImpl.save(SessionImpl.java:693)
at org.hibernate.impl.SessionImpl.save(SessionImpl.java:689)
at sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor5.invoke(Unknown Source)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
at org.hibernate.context.ThreadLocalSessionContext$TransactionProtectionWrapper.invoke(ThreadLocalSessionContext.java:344)
at $Proxy19.save(Unknown Source)
at com.example.myproject.MyEntityService.save(MyEntityService.java:59) <-- relevant call (see notes below)
at com.example.myproject.MyServlet.doPost(MyServlet.java:164)
... 32 more
Caused by: java.sql.SQLException: Violation of unique constraint MY_ENTITY_UK_1: duplicate value(s) for column(s) MY_COLUMN in statement [...]
at org.hsqldb.jdbc.Util.throwError(Unknown Source)
at org.hsqldb.jdbc.jdbcPreparedStatement.executeUpdate(Unknown Source)
at com.mchange.v2.c3p0.impl.NewProxyPreparedStatement.executeUpdate(NewProxyPreparedStatement.java:105)
at org.hibernate.id.insert.AbstractSelectingDelegate.performInsert(AbstractSelectingDelegate.java:57)
... 54 more
In this example, there's a lot more. What we're mostly concerned about is looking for methods that are from our code, which would be anything in the com.example.myproject
package. From the second example (above), we'd first want to look down for the root cause, which is:
Caused by: java.sql.SQLException
However, all the method calls under that are library code. So we'll move up to the "Caused by" above it, and in that "Caused by" block, look for the first method call originating from our code, which is:
at com.example.myproject.MyEntityService.save(MyEntityService.java:59)
Like in previous examples, we should look at MyEntityService.java
on line 59
, because that's where this error originated (this one's a bit obvious what went wrong, since the SQLException states the error, but the debugging procedure is what we're after).
Best Answer
This means that your
/lib/libthread_db.so.1
does not match your/lib/libpthread.so.0
. Such mismatch could be the result of you installing different versions oflibc
andlibthread_db
packages, or updating one or the other outside of the package management system. It could also be an error in your packages (i.e. they may not be built correctly).You should ignore
/lib/.debug/*
-- that is not the library you are looking for.