Separate debugging symbols with ELF (Linux) binaries

This repository is a tutorial on how to separate the debugging symbols from the final executable, and still be able to debug it.

Requirements

• C compiler (e.g. Clang)
• Make
• binutils

Note: some of this tutorial also applies to MinGW.

Instructions

First, the executable is built, and it contains the debugging symbols.

clang -g main.c -o main

Then the debugging symbols are extracted into a new file.

objcopy --only-keep-debug main main.dbg

The final executable is stripped of debugging symbols.

objcopy --strip-debug main

Additionally, a debug link can be added to allow GDB to find the file with the debugging symbols.

objcopy --add-gnu-debuglink=main.dbg main

If everything works well GDB should say something like:

Reading symbols from main...Reading symbols from /some/directory/separate-symbols/main.dbg...done.
done.

You can also run GDB and add the file manually:

(gdb) exec-file main
(gdb) symbol-file main.dbg

Credits

Inspired by this answer on StackOverflow.

Also check the GDB manual.