GDB ignores my breakpoints

Question

My test case is so simple that I must be doing something very stupid. I wrote a simple source file test.c:

#include

int main(int         


        

Answer 1

(curated from comments)

You do not appear do be doing anything wrong; It appears to be GDB's fault.

The message During startup program exited normally. is anomalous, the correct one being Program exited normally.. It suggests GDB failed to insert a breakpoint in main() or the traced program's call to ptrace(PT_TRACE_ME, 0, 0, 0) failed. The program thus ran without being stopped, and it exited while GDB was only expecting it to start up and stop at exec(). Can you run gdb under strace while doing your example and grep strace's log for any failed ptrace calls?

You would do so with strace -f -o syscall.txt gdb ./a.out.

As of right now a stop-gap measure appears to be to run GDB as root.