Find info from address in debugging-Collection of common programming errors

Usually yes. Assuming your program crashed outside GDB due to SIGSEGV and left a core dump, you can:
A: find out which instruction actually caused the access violation:

    (gdb) x/i $pc

This will usually be a memory access instruction, e.g. "movl $1,8(%eax)". What’s important is then what value does the register which is supposed to point to valid memory have.
B. find out value of that register:

   (gdb) p/x $eax

Often this would be 0 (you are writing through a NULL pointer), or some nonsense value, e.g. 0x32314043 (you’ve corrupted the pointer, or overwrote it with an ASCII string).

The GDB "info symbol" command will tell you which symbol (if any) is near the given address.

Use the same "info symbol" command for addresses slightly smaller and slightly larger the address of your “target” variable.