Stack trace from core file without executable

[Ray Ruvinskiy <rruvinsk at sybase dot com>]

Hello,

frysk's fstack had a feature that I found quite useful: the ability to  
extract (fairly accurate) stack traces from core files without needing  
the executable that generated them. gdb, on the other hand, does not  
appear to be able to do this very well. (Running a simple executable  
that does nothing but call abort() and then attempting to get the  
stack trace from the resulting core file using fstack and gdb  
demonstrates this fairly well.)

I was wondering what accounts for fstack's ability (or gdb's lack of  
ability) to do this, and how feasible it would be to migrate this  
functionality to archer or gdb.

Thanks,

Ray