Inspecting long running programs

[Charles G Waldman]

Greg McFarlane writes:
 > Has anyone had experience with doing interactive debugging of long
 > running programs?
<snip>
 > Has anyone done this?  Are there standard ways to inspect running
 > python programs?

I usually attach a GDB to the process and go rummaging around.  This
is also a great way to learn about the Python internals.  It's not too 
hard to find out where in the Python code you are, a little trickier
to print out the values of variables, etc, but this *can* be done.  In 
fact one of my "toy projects" is a program PyGDB which sits between
the user and GDB and facilitates this sort of debugging.  You can find 
a snapshot at http://home.fnal.gov/~cgw/python/ but it's really too
broken for general use.  Alas, I never seem to find the time to finish 
this...