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Discussion on: Debugging - you’re doing it wrong. 10 techniques to find a bug in your code

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Simon Massey • Edited

I set up a debugger to step through some open source code that I had volunteered to help out with. I was wanting to add a small feature so wanted to step through to get familiar. On the first step through the code I saw a bug that had been around a while and saw some dead code. I wasn’t looking for bugs but I was reading ahead and stepping and it suddenly did stuff that I mentally said “oh! why? that cannot be right...”.

This particular project is a bash tool to encrypt secrets in git called git-secret. No-one had run a debugger as its bash and folks don’t really thinks about debugging bash with breakpoints. Fortunately visual studio code on mac can integrate with bashdb and you can step through. So i made a video to show others on that project how to use a bashdb with vs code.

Maybe you will see something for the first time if you try stepping through code. Just a thought.