Furball: The Linux Equivalent of DOS's 'debug.com'

I have seen "symdeb for linux" as early as 1999; there was an entire symbdeb clone somewhere in simtel, written in NASM (or an early precursor, don't remember) and the author was bugging alt.asm.x86 for quite sometime, reporting his progress. Boldyshev might have an idea, if he is still at it.

Or both. Did Nirva ever tell you the story of when he entered the ACM programming contest and wrote his entries in debug.com?

A few years ago, I was in a tech support call with a Dell tech. He was putting me through some kind of reinstallation process, I don't recall exactly. Anyway, he actually had me boot from a Dell diagnostic CD, run debug.com, and type in the necessary commands to hard-format the drive. At the time, I thought the whole process was pretty novel. I wonder if they would do the same today.

I'd love to see a longer list of debug tricks like this. I've for _First Steps in 80286 Assembly_ and understand the theory, but I find it's easier to learn by example.