File format not recognized with GNU gdb 6.4 on Solaris 10

Question

Below details are from a session in a Sun machine running Solaris 10.

$ file devli
devli: ELF 32-bit MSB executable SPARC Version 1, dynamically linked, stripped
$ file a
a: ELF 32-bit MSB executable SPARC Version 1, dynamically linked, not stripped
$ gdb
GNU gdb 6.4
Copyright 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are
welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB.  Type "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "sparc-sun-solaris2.10".
(gdb) file a
Reading symbols from /tmp/tnmy/a...(no debugging symbols found)...done.
(gdb) file devli
"/tmp/tnmy/devli": not in executable format: File format not recognized
(gdb) q
$ ls -l a devlisrvr
-rwxr-xr-x   1 test2    dba         1480 Dec 23 18:23 a
-rwxr-xr-x   1 test2    dba       633088 Dec 23 18:26 devli
$ uname -a ;
SunOS myhost 5.10 Generic_127111-11 sun4v sparc SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T5220
$ cat a.c
int main() {return 0;}
$ /opt/SUNONE8/SUNWspro/bin/CC -V
CC: Sun C++ 5.5 2003/03/12
$ file `which gdb`
/usr/local/bin/gdb: ELF 32-bit MSB executable SPARC Version 1, dynamically linked, not stripped
$

Any details on why would not gdb recognize the file format for devli? I searched over the Internet but could not find anything related to this particular issue. Any pointers would be helpful.

a.c goes into a, built using gcc; devli using Sun ONE Studio 8.

Answer 1

Note that GDB 6.4 is 4 years old. You might get better luck with (current) GDB 7.0.

It is also possible that the devli executable is corrupt (file just looks at the first few bytes of the executable, but GDB requires much more of the file contents to be self-consistent). Does readelf --all > /dev/null report any warnings?