

Furball: The Linux Equivalent of DOS's 'debug.com' - asciilifeform
http://modest-proposals.com/Furball.htm

======
tptacek
Funny you should mention that. Timur, Chris, and I have been puttering around
with a better Unix debugger interface for awhile now; Timur just wrote some of
it up:

[http://www.matasano.com/log/1799/ruby-for-pentesters-the-
dar...](http://www.matasano.com/log/1799/ruby-for-pentesters-the-dark-side-i-
ragweed/)

Debuggers want to be programming environments. Or, trivial 20k command line
programs. GDB is stuck uncomfortably in the middle, I agree.

~~~
mahmud
I have seen "symdeb for linux" as early as 1999; there was an entire symbdeb
clone somewhere in simtel, written in NASM (or an early precursor, don't
remember) and the author was bugging alt.asm.x86 for quite sometime, reporting
his progress. Boldyshev might have an idea, if he is still at it.

------
lallysingh
Some stupid debug tricks:

    
    
      a 0100
      cli
      jmp 0101
    
      r
    

Clears interrupts and puts the CPU into an infinite loop. Takes down Win95/98
cold. Thankfully NT+ don't actually give DOS programs control over interrupts.

    
    
      ? 0100 (I forget which cmd lets you directly edit the memory in hex)
      ea 00 00 ff ff
      
      r
    

Quick reboot. The malicious will think of fun places to put this. Hint: rhymes
with "soot vector"

Sometimes I wonder if the greatest loss when technology shifts are all the
stupid tricks we learned on the way.

~~~
whughes
A few years ago, I was in a tech support call with a Dell tech. He was putting
me through some kind of reinstallation process, I don't recall exactly.
Anyway, he actually had me boot from a Dell diagnostic CD, run debug.com, and
type in the necessary commands to hard-format the drive. At the time, I
thought the whole process was pretty novel. I wonder if they would do the same
today.

