I am using EDB and stepping through the program but I do not even know what the difference in behavior is when doing this. I feel like this is something I should know if I ever have hope of reverse engineering this program.
The gdb
terms (and commands) are step
and next
and the difference is that step
continues to run until it changes line of source code, while next
doesn't trace into a subroutine, but rather skips over it. The stepi
and nexti
commands are similar but operate at the machine instruction level rather than source code level. Read more in The Fine Manual.