More on talking to szadb

A general szadb command has a form
address ,count request_with_its_modifiers
where each of three parts is optional or possibly not used. Please refer to the documentation to see all available requests. For all practical purposes count -1 means forever. Read a little bit further before trying this.

Display format modifiers can be concatenated together. For example, the following

main,9/ai
will print the first nine instructions, labelled by their addresses, starting from _main. Like this:


[]maindis.exm


Note that the leading underscore, required to produce an internal form of a symbol main was prepended automatically. To get to an address of __main, if such symbol in your program exists, you have to type its name in full. Similar but slightly different rules will be in force if your program has a symbol table in the MWC format.

If you do not know which symbols are available issue a request $e. A display similar to the following will start to scroll accross your screen.


[]symbols.exm


The general method to stop a scrolling screen for a moment is to use 〈^S〉 and any other key will continue. A 〈^C〉 will cancel the command and any further output. Starting with version 1.4 this includes also a paging. This means that display stops after showing one screenful of symbols and szadb waits for your keyboard input. Keys 〈q〉, 〈Q〉 and 〈^C〉 break, any other key continues. A processing of the request is finished when you will get back a standard szadb prompt of ``> ''.

Some hexadecimal numbers may look like symbols. For example, if you happen to have a symbol abba in your program then szadb will understand main+abba as a request for setting the ``dot'' to an address which is a sum of addresses of main and abba, even if you really meant an adress at offset of 0xabba from main. To avoid this misinterpretation it is enough to type main+0abba — a number has a leading zero. It the symbol abba is not defined then the ambiguity does not arise. Assuming that the default base is sixteen abba will be taken as a number. Otherwise such expression will be not accepted and you will see only an error message. The form 0xabba has a unique meaning and always works.