Programmatic access to stack traces in C or C++ programs

["Ashwin Bharambe" <ashwinb@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

I wanted to create a "stacktrace library" which would provide a
routine to obtain the stacktrace of the program from any point
_programmatically_ (like Java's stacktraces, for example..)

I was aware of libc's non-standard stacktrace API but it did not quite
work in many cases failing to resolve addresses, etc. It seems like
stacktrace functionality is quite implementation and
architecture-dependent. So, I was wondering if I could use portions of
gdb's code to create such a library. Currently, to print a stacktrace,
I utilize a piece of code (not mine, it's off the net) which fork()s a
gdb sub-process, makes it ptrace the parent and run the command
"backtrace". However this is quite time-consuming and sort of ugly.

My question, therefore, is: are there pieces of the code I can steal
from libgdb to make this happen programmatically. I tried some naive
ways of performing gdb_init() and then having it execute the
'backtrace' command (by invoking backtrace_command directly, for
example), however gdb says there's no stack. This seems to be the case
because it does not initialize its data structures without starting a
process.

I would appreciate any pointers regarding how I can make gdb believe
the current process is the one it should use, without really
ptrace()ing it...

Thanks very much for reading the long message!
Ashwin

-- 
Ashwin Bharambe,  Ph.D. Candidate, Carnegie Mellon University.
Web: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ashu