As a C newbie, I've never gotten a segfault until tonight (yes, my homework's due in a couple of hours..).

gdb helped out a lot by letting me get from "segfault happened" to "function x and y were called but z failed at my_file.c:30, here's that line for you: ...".

The slide Introduction to segmentation fault handling rocks; based on that article, this is kinda what my process & debugging step in the makefile looks like now:

gcc -Wall -c -g *.c
gcc -o my_program *.o
gdb my_program
(inside gdb) run
(inside gdb) <..make your program segfault..>
(inside gdb) backtrace

Sweet!