GDB on Windows machine

Question

Let us say I am on a Windows machine and I goto its command line terminal and type 'gdb' there. I get gdb prompt (gdb) as shown in the following image. It means gdb.exe is installed on the machine.

My understanding is that the GDB is client-server application. I want to know is this gdb.exe the gdbserver or gdbclient? If its the former then where would be the later and if its the later then where would be the former in this case?

Answer 1

GDB can be a client server application, but it doesn't have to be.

What you started is gdb itself, so, the client side. The server is actually called, gdbserver.

Usually, you'd make use of gdbserver when you want to debug something running on a different machine over a network (though there's nothing to stop you running gdbserver on the same machine as gdb itself).

You can also use gdb to directly start an application to debug, so at the (gdb) prompt you might do:

(gdb) file /path/to/some/executable
(gdb) break main
(gdb) run

For further reading the manual has lots of details, there's a simple example session and more details on remote debug.