Recover source from binary with debug symbols

[sandromani]

Hi,
I was wondering, if I have a binary which was compiled with debug symbols, to what extent am I able to recover the source code of the various source files? And how? Usually crashing the program on purpose by passing bad pointers to the arguments allows me to view quite a lot of the source code in that specific section via gdb, but maybe there is a nicer way?
Thanks!

[weaknessforcats]

If you can crash a program on purpose, it suggests that the program needs error handling code installed.

The program should detect the bad pointer, write to a log file all necessary data, location, date time, user name, etc and then gracefully terminate.

The analyst, who has the code, looks in the log file to see what happened.

There are decompilers around but you lose the the variable names, function names, comments, etc. What you get is code that is not readable but compiles.