From: "Dr. Vesselin Bontchev" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> I want to construct a PDB database on a PC, so I need to
> understand the file format of the PDB files.
>
At the risk of sounding negative, I disagree. I'd prefer to see
"I want to construct a PDB database on a PC, so I need to
know which of the many tools I should use. My requirements
are...". Many have been down this path and released source
that does this work. While this sort of low-levl work can be
entertaining as an inteelectual exercise, it's really not that
productive.
As Ben said, there's par, there's also a COM tool called pdbc
(yes?) and a commercial COM tool called PDBGo, as well as
about a dozen other products I'm not familiar with. They've all
been built by people who worked out these byte alignment
issues some time ago.
> OK, I understand that the PDB file has a 80-byte header:
(snip)
> What is supposed to follow is numRecords records, each having the
following structure:
(snip)
> Now, if I examine a real PDB file with a hex editor, the stuff after the
80-byte header looks like this:
>
> 02 D0 40 F3 20 01 00 00
> 02 F1 40 F3 20 02 00 00
> 03 04 40 F3 20 03 00 00
> 03 16 40 F3 20 04 00 00
>
> In fact, in the particular file I'm examining, the first part
> ("02 D0") *can* be interpreted like that - indeed the first data
> record resides at offset 0x02D0 from the beginning of the file.
> But where does "40 F3" come from and what is its meaning?
>
Shrug. If the first record starts at 0x02D0 then my bet is that
there's 00 00 before that 02 D0 and that the 40 F3 isn't part of
the offset but is the attributes / id pair (40 = dirty? suggesting that
this pdb is taken from a backup). But I might be wrong, since
getting abyte or two off when deconstructing a binary format
can seriously mess up your interpretation. Although I suspect
from your bio that I don't need to explain this to you. :-)
Don't expect anything of value in the UniqueID field, it's only
significant on the device and can be zeros for created PDBs.
Chris Tutty
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