debugging matlab mex

August 16, 2012 - One minute read - 90 words

One thing I’ve been doing a bit of lately is debugging MATLAB mex files; it seemed worth documenting. The broad strokes:

recompile all mex codes with ‘-g’
quit MATLAB
From a command prompt, run

$ /Applications/MATLAB_R2012a.app/bin/matlab -Dgdb
[snip]
(gdb) run -nojvm
>> run_your_mex_file

This gives debugging output. If there is an error in the code, you’re dropped back to a gdb prompt, where you can continue debugging in a semi-normal fashion. Typically, I end up doing a ‘where’ to get a stack trace, and debug from there more-or-less like usual.