I'm using GCC 4.4.1 and GDB 7.0-ubuntu on Ubuntu 9.10. However, GCC won't generate debugger info when using any of the following switches: -g, -g3, -ggdb, or -ggdb3. So when I run the program with GDB, its as if there was no debugger information generated. I have created very simple test source files in a new, empty folder. Here is one example: #include <stdlib.h> #include <stdio.h> int main (int argc, char **argv) { char msg[4]; // allocate 4 bytes on the stack strcpy (msg, "hello world"); // overflow printf ("%s\n", msg); return 0; }