What is the structure of a PDB file?

Question

I am trying to understand how a debugger uses PDB file. It would probably be a small file system in itself. Could someone help me understand the structure of the PDB file?

Answer 1

According to this blog post, the actual file format is kept secret by MS. However, I recommend you read that post as it has a lot of useful information what a PDB file is and how it's used.

Answer 2

According to MSDN, its impractical:

Because the format of the .pdb file generated by the postcompiler tools undergoes constant revision, exposing the format is impractical

A debugger would use the DIA SDK to access the data inside them, meaning you don't really need to know its structure.

Answer 3

As a matter of fact, the format of PDB is not documented, but you can collect very detailed information about the content of PDB files programmatically using the appropriate interfaces See Sample