gdb fails to run ELF 64-bit program with “File format not recognized”

Question

I\'m trying to use GDB to debug (to find an annoying segfault). When I run:

gdb ./filename

from the command line, I get the following error:

Answer 1

The question refers to "./filename" and to "/path/executable". Are these the same file?

If you are doing a post-mortem analysis, you would run:

gdb executable-file core-file

If you are going to ignore the core file, you would run:

gdb executable-file

In both cases, 'executable-file' means a pathname to the binary you want to debug. Most usually, that is actually a simple filename in the current directory, since you have the source code from your debug build there.

On Solaris, a 64-bit build of GDB is supposed to be able to debug both 32-bit and 64-bit executables (though I've had some issues with recent versions of GDB). I'm not sure of the converse - that a 32-bit GDB can necessarily debug 64-bit executables.