How does a debug build make reverse engineering easy?

Posted by danny on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by danny
Published on 2010-12-07T09:56:49Z Indexed on 2011/01/16 1:53 UTC
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Filed under:

c++

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debugging

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reverse-engineering

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information

Some answer here stated that debug info would make it easier to reverse engineer the software. When I use Visual C++ and distribute an executable with debugging information but without other files (.pdb), will it contain any interesting things?

I looked to the executable with a hex editor and found nothing like symbol names, for now I assume the .exe file just links to information in the .pdb files, right?

Do you know whether it contains

variable names?
function/member names?
line numbers?
anything interesting?

Thanks!

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