Hello,
I would like to know how can I obtain source file names inside an executable or library using the debugging information.

Thanks,
Vince

Debugging using gdb or something like strace? See the thing is this is harder than it looks. The reason is that unless the maintainers in the source used descriptive functional names in their libraries and calls, or descriptive hard coded strings in the compiled binary there's no way to find source file names. However, a lot of programs you can find this kind of information. Learn how to use a disassembler (special program to view binary files) and you might find the information that you seek. A reverse engineering forum might be better able to help you with something like this though.

You can have a look at gdb source for inspiration.
But what do you need those source file names for ?
Do you write your own debugger ?

If your executable hasn't been stripped, you can use the

nm -a <executable_name>

to dump all symbols in it, including source filenames. Source file names are debugging-only symbols, hence the -a switch. They will be somewhere at the end of the output.

I'm rewriting a makefile from a complicated one.
The executables contains the file names needed to be build.

Thanks,
nm -al <executable_name>
did the trick.

I also found:
objdump -dl <executable_name>

I don't know yet if I will get the same result with the two commands above but the first one is faster.

Thanks