Coders Like Us

In the iPhone work I’ve been doing (my app), I’ve seen one error a number of times.. with various causes that were hard to track down. I’d see TERMINATED_DUE_TO_UNCAUGHT_EXCEPTION and never got a good stack trace. I found the solution in an iPhone dev forum (here) and thought I’d write this up to share the answer in case it saves someone some time.

What you need to do is set a breakpoint in objc_throw_exception. To do that, create a .gdbinit file in your home directory. Add the following to that file (I think the last line is the most important, but I have all of this in mine).

fb -[NSException raise]
fb -[_NSZombie release]
fb szone_error
fb objc_exception_throw

Then, bring up the debugger and run your app. Once you get an exception raised, the debugger stops where that exception is about to be thrown and you can see exactly where, in your code the problem originated! Big help to me, I can tell you! (Thanks, PhoneyDeveloper@iphonedevsdk.com!)