# Debugging abnormal exits on Windows

**URL:** <https://discourse.slicer.org/t/debugging-abnormal-exits-on-windows/20120>\
**Category:** Development\
**Created:** [October 12, 2021, 3:59pm UTC](https://discourse.slicer.org/t/debugging-abnormal-exits-on-windows/20120 "2021-10-12T15:59:34Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![adamaji](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/discourse.slicer.org/adamaji/32/12772_2.png) [@adamaji](https://discourse.slicer.org/u/adamaji)\
**Post date:** [October 12, 2021, 3:59pm UTC](https://discourse.slicer.org/t/debugging-abnormal-exits-on-windows/20120/1 "2021-10-12T15:59:34Z")

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Hi folks,

I’m wondering if anyone has experience debugging abnormal exits/crashes on Windows, and what the best practices are for debugging these – errors like

`error: [.../SlicerApp-real.exe] exit abnormally - Report the problem.`

I’m familiar with the resources at [https://slicer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/developer\_guide/debugging/index.html](https://slicer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/developer_guide/debugging/index.html) and attaching to processes for line by line debugging, but it seems difficult to use this method to debug my issue. I have an Azure Pipeline where an installed instance of Slicer is called with some custom scripted (Python) modules running through some unit/integration tests, which throws the abnormal exit issue seemingly at random – a certain job may fail once, but rerunning that job can get it to pass.

For this, I think what I want is to dump the stack trace from Slicer automatically whenever a crash has occurred, but I’m not sure how to do this on Windows.

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**Author:** ![lassoan](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/discourse.slicer.org/lassoan/32/13_2.png) [@lassoan](https://discourse.slicer.org/u/lassoan)\
**Post date:** [October 12, 2021, 9:09pm UTC](https://discourse.slicer.org/t/debugging-abnormal-exits-on-windows/20120/2 "2021-10-12T21:09:30Z")

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Probably you can set up automatic stack trace of a crashing application - see for example tips [here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24208767/get-stack-trace-of-a-crash-on-windows-without-installing-visual-studio-c).

I’m not sure how detailed the stack trace is without debug symbols. Probably for many functions you only see the address and not the function name. A RelWithDebInfo (Release-mode build with debug information) build could give you more information, but debug symbols (all the .pdb files) for a Slicer build are quite large, about 9GB, so it would not be very easy to distribute those.