Setup

The previous chapter installed gcc. This chapter adds three more tools — make, gdb, and valgrind — plus the sanitisers, which ship as flags inside gcc itself. All four are part of standard Linux package repositories.

If you are on WSL 2, run these inside your Linux distribution. If you are on native Linux, run them in your terminal as usual. If you are on macOS, you need a Linux VM for this chapter — the tools below are GNU/Linux-specific, and valgrind in particular does not run on Apple Silicon.

Install the tools

On Debian, Ubuntu, and derivatives, or WSL 2:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install build-essential gdb valgrind

build-essential is the meta-package — it pulls in make, gcc, and the C standard library headers if any of them are missing.

Verify

Each of these should print a version banner without error:

gcc --version
make --version
gdb --version
valgrind --version

The sanitisers do not need a separate install — they live inside gcc. The fastest check is to compile a tiny program with the address sanitiser enabled:

echo 'int main(void){return 0;}' > /tmp/check.c
gcc -fsanitize=address /tmp/check.c -o /tmp/check
/tmp/check
echo $?
rm /tmp/check.c /tmp/check

The program does nothing, links against the AddressSanitizer runtime, and exits with status 0. If the compile or run fails, your distribution's gcc is older than the sanitisers — install gcc-9 or later.

A working directory

Create a directory for this chapter's work and change into it:

mkdir ~/f05-practice
cd ~/f05-practice

You will spend the rest of the chapter inside this directory.