Here is how to use gcov to test code coverage in ldb. Step 1: build ldb with gcov enabled make clean all WITH_GCOV=1 Step 3: run the test suite make test-tdb Step 4: produce the gcov report make gcov Step 5: read the summary reports less *.report.gcov Step 6: examine the per-file reports less ldb_tdb\#ldb_tdb.c.gcov You can also combine steps 2 to 4 like this: make clean all test-tdb gcov WITH_GCOV=1 Note that you should not expect 100% coverage, as some error paths (such as memory allocation failures) are very hard to trigger. There are ways of working around this, but they are quite tricky (they involve allocation wrappers that "fork and fail on malloc"). The lines to look for in the per-file reports are the ones starting with "#####". Those are lines that are never executed.