Starting

It is possible to run szadb either from a desktop or from a text shell, in either low, medium or high resolution. In this tutorial we will assume that szadb was launched from a command line on a screen 80 characters wide (this setting affects only the layout of some displays) and that the executable is called adb.ttp, in tribute to its older brother.

The simplest way of starting szadb is to type something similar to

adb.ttp program.ext
where program.ext is any executable. Note that the file extension (tos, ttp,prg) must be provided. For debugging purposes, it is preferable to compile your program with debugger information (symbol tables). For Sozobon pass the option -t to either cc or ld. It is possible to debug a program without this information but this is not a trivial task. This tutorial assumes that symbolic information is provided.

For debugging purposes, it is much preferable not to strip off symbol tables. In this tutorial we will always assume that this was not done. To achieve that effect, while compiling with Sozobon C, pass -t flag to cc.

If you do not have your favourite test program handy then you may compile from the provided sources and use for experiments a simplified version of unexpand.tos; it replaces, if possible, runs of white space from stdin with tabs and writes results on stdout. Further examples will use that program compiled by Sozobon C compiler, version 1.3, with -t and -O flags.

Once the debugger is started you should see on your screen a display resembling the following:

Szadb version 1.3mj+ach(english)
>
indicating that everything is in order. The character > is the prompt. Its presence is the most striking visual feature showing that we are not dealing with the ``real'' adb.