Conditions under which stepping into shared library should work in gdb?

Question

There are many questions related to specific errors why stepping into a shared library with gdb isn\'t working. None of them provide a systematic answer on how to confirm wh

Answer 1

Your problem is self-imposed: don't do this: set step-mode on, and step will work as you expect.

From the GDB manual:

set step-mode
set step-mode on
The set step-mode on command causes the step command to stop at the first
instruction of a function which contains no debug line information
rather than stepping over it.

This is useful in cases where you may be interested in inspecting the machine
instructions of a function which has no symbolic info and do not want
GDB to automatically skip over this function.

You are interested in the opposite of the above -- you want to step into the print_from_lib function and avoid stopping inside the PLT jump stub and the dynamic loader's symbol resolution function.