Dwarf Expert

If you're debugging why gdb is showing garbage variable names or building tools that need to parse debug symbols from compiled binaries, this gives Claude expertise in DWARF format versions 3 through 5. It'll help you use dwarfdump and llvm-dwarfdump for verification, write code with libraries like libdwarf or pyelftools, or just answer questions about what DW_TAG_subprogram actually means. The skill knows to point you at dwarfstd.org for spec details and LLVM's implementation as a reference. It won't help with actual runtime debugging (use gdb for that) or reverse engineering binaries, just understanding and working with the DWARF debug format itself.

skills.sh installs: 5.6K
GitHub stars: 8.1K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add trailofbits/skills --skill dwarf-expert --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

DWARF Expert

Expertise for DWARF debug info: parsing and searching it, verifying its integrity, answering questions about the standard, and writing code that consumes it. Out of scope: runtime debugging (use gdb/lldb), reverse engineering beyond the DWARF sections (use Ghidra/IDA), and compiler-specific DWARF generation bugs.

Authoritative Sources

When precision matters, look standard details up instead of answering from memory:

dwarfstd.org — the official specification. Web-search specific sections, e.g. "DWARF5 DW_TAG_subprogram attributes site:dwarfstd.org".
LLVM — llvm/lib/DebugInfo/DWARF/ is a reliable reference implementation: DWARFDie.cpp (DIE and attribute access), DWARFUnit.cpp (compilation units), DWARFDebugLine.cpp (line tables), DWARFVerifier.cpp (validation).
libdwarf — the reference C implementation at github.com/davea42/libdwarf-code.