A Sample Session

You can use this manual at your leisure to read all about . However, a handful of commands are enough to get started using the debugger. This chapter illustrates those commands.

In this sample session, we emphasize user input like this: input, to make it easier to pick out from the surrounding output.

One of the preliminary versions of GNU m4 (a generic macro processor) exhibits the following bug: sometimes, when we change its quote strings from the default, the commands used to capture one macro definition within another stop working. In the following short m4 session, we define a macro foo which expands to 0000; we then use the m4 built-in defn to define bar as the same thing. However, when we change the open quote string to <QUOTE> and the close quote string to <UNQUOTE>, the same procedure fails to define a new synonym baz:

$ cd gnu/m4
$ ./m4
define(foo,0000)

foo
0000
define(bar,defn(`foo'))

bar
0000
changequote(<QUOTE>,<UNQUOTE>)

define(baz,defn(<QUOTE>foo<UNQUOTE>))
baz
C-d
m4: End of input: 0: fatal error: EOF in string

Let us use to try to see what is going on.

$  m4
GDB is free software and you are welcome to distribute copies
 of it under certain conditions; type "show copying" to see 
 the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB; type "show warranty" 
 for details.
GDB , Copyright 1995 Free Software Foundation, Inc...
()

reads only enough symbol data to know where to find the rest when needed; as a result, the first prompt comes up very quickly. We now tell to use a narrower display width than usual, so that examples fit in this manual.

() set width 70

We need to see how the m4 built-in changequote works. Having looked at the source, we know the relevant subroutine is m4_changequote, so we set a breakpoint there with the break command.

() break m4_changequote
Breakpoint 1 at 0x62f4: file builtin.c, line 879.

Using the run command, we start m4 running under control; as long as control does not reach the m4_changequote subroutine, the program runs as usual:

() run
Starting program: /work/Editorial/gdb/gnu/m4/m4
define(foo,0000)

foo
0000

To trigger the breakpoint, we call changequote. suspends execution of m4, displaying information about the context where it stops.

changequote(<QUOTE>,<UNQUOTE>)

Breakpoint 1, m4_changequote (argc=3, argv=0x33c70) 
    at builtin.c:879
879         if (bad_argc(TOKEN_DATA_TEXT(argv[0]),argc,1,3))

Now we use the command n (next) to advance execution to the next line of the current function.

() n
882         set_quotes((argc >= 2) ? TOKEN_DATA_TEXT(argv[1])\
 : nil,

set_quotes looks like a promising subroutine. We can go into it by using the command s (step) instead of next. step goes to the next line to be executed in any subroutine, so it steps into set_quotes.

() s
set_quotes (lq=0x34c78 "<QUOTE>", rq=0x34c88 "<UNQUOTE>")
    at input.c:530
530         if (lquote != def_lquote)

The display that shows the subroutine where m4 is now suspended (and its arguments) is called a stack frame display. It shows a summary of the stack. We can use the backtrace command (which can also be spelled bt), to see where we are in the stack as a whole: the backtrace command displays a stack frame for each active subroutine.

() bt
#0  set_quotes (lq=0x34c78 "<QUOTE>", rq=0x34c88 "<UNQUOTE>")
    at input.c:530
#1  0x6344 in m4_changequote (argc=3, argv=0x33c70) 
    at builtin.c:882
#2  0x8174 in expand_macro (sym=0x33320) at macro.c:242
#3  0x7a88 in expand_token (obs=0x0, t=209696, td=0xf7fffa30)
    at macro.c:71
#4  0x79dc in expand_input () at macro.c:40
#5  0x2930 in main (argc=0, argv=0xf7fffb20) at m4.c:195

We step through a few more lines to see what happens. The first two times, we can use `s'; the next two times we use n to avoid falling into the xstrdup subroutine.

() s
0x3b5c  532         if (rquote != def_rquote)
() s
0x3b80  535         lquote = (lq == nil || *lq == '\0') ?  \
def_lquote : xstrdup(lq);
() n
536         rquote = (rq == nil || *rq == '\0') ? def_rquote\
 : xstrdup(rq);
() n
538         len_lquote = strlen(rquote);

The last line displayed looks a little odd; we can examine the variables lquote and rquote to see if they are in fact the new left and right quotes we specified. We use the command p (print) to see their values.

() p lquote
$1 = 0x35d40 "<QUOTE>"
() p rquote
$2 = 0x35d50 "<UNQUOTE>"

lquote and rquote are indeed the new left and right quotes. To look at some context, we can display ten lines of source surrounding the current line with the l (list) command.

() l
533             xfree(rquote);
534
535         lquote = (lq == nil || *lq == '\0') ? def_lquote\
 : xstrdup (lq);
536         rquote = (rq == nil || *rq == '\0') ? def_rquote\
 : xstrdup (rq);
537
538         len_lquote = strlen(rquote);
539         len_rquote = strlen(lquote);
540     }
541
542     void

Let us step past the two lines that set len_lquote and len_rquote, and then examine the values of those variables.

() n
539         len_rquote = strlen(lquote);
() n
540     }
() p len_lquote
$3 = 9
() p len_rquote
$4 = 7

That certainly looks wrong, assuming len_lquote and len_rquote are meant to be the lengths of lquote and rquote respectively. We can set them to better values using the p command, since it can print the value of any expression--and that expression can include subroutine calls and assignments.

() p len_lquote=strlen(lquote)
$5 = 7
() p len_rquote=strlen(rquote)
$6 = 9

Is that enough to fix the problem of using the new quotes with the m4 built-in defn? We can allow m4 to continue executing with the c (continue) command, and then try the example that caused trouble initially:

() c
Continuing.

define(baz,defn(<QUOTE>foo<UNQUOTE>))

baz
0000

Success! The new quotes now work just as well as the default ones. The problem seems to have been just the two typos defining the wrong lengths. We allow m4 exit by giving it an EOF as input:

C-d
Program exited normally.

The message `Program exited normally.' is from ; it indicates m4 has finished executing. We can end our session with the quit command.

() quit

Getting In and Out of

This chapter discusses how to start , and how to get out of it. (The essentials: type `' to start GDB, and type quit or C-d to exit.)

Invoking

Invoke by running the program . Once started, reads commands from the terminal until you tell it to exit.

You can also run with a variety of arguments and options, to specify more of your debugging environment at the outset.

The most usual way to start is with one argument, specifying an executable program:

 program

You can also start with both an executable program and a core file specified:

 program core

You can, instead, specify a process ID as a second argument, if you want to debug a running process:

 program 1234

would attach to process 1234 (unless you also have a file named `1234'; does check for a core file first).

Taking advantage of the second command-line argument requires a fairly complete operating system; when you use as a remote debugger attached to a bare board, there may not be any notion of "process", and there is often no way to get a core dump.

You can further control how starts up by using command-line options. itself can remind you of the options available.

Type

 -help

to display all available options and briefly describe their use (` -h' is a shorter equivalent).

All options and command line arguments you give are processed in sequential order. The order makes a difference when the `-x' option is used.

The debugging stub is specific to the architecture of the remote machine; for example, use `sparc-stub.c' to debug programs on SPARC boards.

These working remote stubs are distributed with :

sparc-stub.c

For SPARC architectures.

m68k-stub.c

For Motorola 680x0 architectures.

i386-stub.c

For Intel 386 and compatible architectures.

The `README' file in the distribution may list other recently added stubs.

What the stub can do for you

The debugging stub for your architecture supplies these three subroutines:

set_debug_traps

This routine arranges for handle_exception to run when your program stops. You must call this subroutine explicitly near the beginning of your program.

handle_exception

This is the central workhorse, but your program never calls it explicitly--the setup code arranges for handle_exception to run when a trap is triggered. handle_exception takes control when your program stops during execution (for example, on a breakpoint), and mediates communications with on the host machine. This is where the communications protocol is implemented; handle_exception acts as the representative on the target machine; it begins by sending summary information on the state of your program, then continues to execute, retrieving and transmitting any information needs, until you execute a command that makes your program resume; at that point, handle_exception returns control to your own code on the target machine.

breakpoint

Use this auxiliary subroutine to make your program contain a breakpoint. Depending on the particular situation, this may be the only way for to get control. For instance, if your target machine has some sort of interrupt button, you won't need to call this; pressing the interrupt button transfers control to handle_exception---in effect, to . On some machines, simply receiving characters on the serial port may also trigger a trap; again, in that situation, you don't need to call breakpoint from your own program--simply running `target remote' from the host session gets control. Call breakpoint if none of these is true, or if you simply want to make certain your program stops at a predetermined point for the start of your debugging session.

What you must do for the stub

The debugging stubs that come with are set up for a particular chip architecture, but they have no information about the rest of your debugging target machine.

First of all you need to tell the stub how to communicate with the serial port.

int getDebugChar()

Write this subroutine to read a single character from the serial port. It may be identical to getchar for your target system; a different name is used to allow you to distinguish the two if you wish.

void putDebugChar(int)

Write this subroutine to write a single character to the serial port. It may be identical to putchar for your target system; a different name is used to allow you to distinguish the two if you wish.

If you want to be able to stop your program while it is running, you need to use an interrupt-driven serial driver, and arrange for it to stop when it receives a ^C (`\003', the control-C character). That is the character which uses to tell the remote system to stop.

Getting the debugging target to return the proper status to probably requires changes to the standard stub; one quick and dirty way is to just execute a breakpoint instruction (the "dirty" part is that reports a SIGTRAP instead of a SIGINT).

Other routines you need to supply are:

void exceptionHandler (int exception_number, void *exception_address)

Write this function to install exception_address in the exception handling tables. You need to do this because the stub does not have any way of knowing what the exception handling tables on your target system are like (for example, the processor's table might be in ROM, containing entries which point to a table in RAM). exception_number is the exception number which should be changed; its meaning is architecture-dependent (for example, different numbers might represent divide by zero, misaligned access, etc). When this exception occurs, control should be transferred directly to exception_address, and the processor state (stack, registers, and so on) should be just as it is when a processor exception occurs. So if you want to use a jump instruction to reach exception_address, it should be a simple jump, not a jump to subroutine. For the 386, exception_address should be installed as an interrupt gate so that interrupts are masked while the handler runs. The gate should be at privilege level 0 (the most privileged level). The SPARC and 68k stubs are able to mask interrupts themself without help from exceptionHandler.

void flush_i_cache()

Write this subroutine to flush the instruction cache, if any, on your target machine. If there is no instruction cache, this subroutine may be a no-op. On target machines that have instruction caches, requires this function to make certain that the state of your program is stable.

You must also make sure this library routine is available:

void *memset(void *, int, int)

This is the standard library function memset that sets an area of memory to a known value. If you have one of the free versions of libc.a, memset can be found there; otherwise, you must either obtain it from your hardware manufacturer, or write your own.

If you do not use the GNU C compiler, you may need other standard library subroutines as well; this varies from one stub to another, but in general the stubs are likely to use any of the common library subroutines which gcc generates as inline code.

Putting it all together

In summary, when your program is ready to debug, you must follow these steps.

1. Make sure you have the supporting low-level routines (see section What you must do for the stub):

   getDebugChar, putDebugChar,
   flush_i_cache, memset, exceptionHandler.
   

2. Insert these lines near the top of your program:

   set_debug_traps();
   breakpoint();
   

3. For the 680x0 stub only, you need to provide a variable called exceptionHook. Normally you just use

   void (*exceptionHook)() = 0;
   

   but if before calling set_debug_traps, you set it to point to a function in your program, that function is called when continues after stopping on a trap (for example, bus error). The function indicated by exceptionHook is called with one parameter: an int which is the exception number.
4. Compile and link together: your program, the debugging stub for your target architecture, and the supporting subroutines.
5. Make sure you have a serial connection between your target machine and the host, and identify the serial port used for this on the host.
6. Download your program to your target machine (or get it there by whatever means the manufacturer provides), and start it.
7. To start remote debugging, run on the host machine, and specify as an executable file the program that is running in the remote machine. This tells how to find your program's symbols and the contents of its pure text. Then establish communication using the target remote command. Its argument specifies how to communicate with the target machine--either via a devicename attached to a direct serial line, or a TCP port (usually to a terminal server which in turn has a serial line to the target). For example, to use a serial line connected to the device named `/dev/ttyb':

   target remote /dev/ttyb
   

   To use a TCP connection, use an argument of the form host:port. For example, to connect to port 2828 on a terminal server named manyfarms:

   target remote manyfarms:2828
   

Now you can use all the usual commands to examine and change data and to step and continue the remote program.

To resume the remote program and stop debugging it, use the detach command.

Whenever is waiting for the remote program, if you type the interrupt character (often C-C), attempts to stop the program. This may or may not succeed, depending in part on the hardware and the serial drivers the remote system uses. If you type the interrupt character once again, displays this prompt:

Interrupted while waiting for the program.
Give up (and stop debugging it)?  (y or n)

If you type y, abandons the remote debugging session. (If you decide you want to try again later, you can use `target remote' again to connect once more.) If you type n, goes back to waiting.

Communication protocol

The stub files provided with implement the target side of the communication protocol, and the side is implemented in the source file `remote.c'. Normally, you can simply allow these subroutines to communicate, and ignore the details. (If you're implementing your own stub file, you can still ignore the details: start with one of the existing stub files. `sparc-stub.c' is the best organized, and therefore the easiest to read.)

However, there may be occasions when you need to know something about the protocol--for example, if there is only one serial port to your target machine, you might want your program to do something special if it recognizes a packet meant for .

All commands and responses (other than acknowledgements, which are single characters) are sent as a packet which includes a checksum. A packet is introduced with the character `$', and ends with the character `#' followed by a two-digit checksum:

$packet info#checksum

checksum is computed as the modulo 256 sum of the packet info characters.

When either the host or the target machine receives a packet, the first response expected is an acknowledgement: a single character, either `+' (to indicate the package was received correctly) or `-' (to request retransmission).

The host () sends commands, and the target (the debugging stub incorporated in your program) sends data in response. The target also sends data when your program stops.

Command packets are distinguished by their first character, which identifies the kind of command.

These are the commands currently supported:

g

Requests the values of CPU registers.

G

Sets the values of CPU registers.

maddr,count

Read count bytes at location addr.

Maddr,count:...

Write count bytes at location addr.

c

caddr

Resume execution at the current address (or at addr if supplied).

s

saddr

Step the target program for one instruction, from either the current program counter or from addr if supplied.

k

Kill the target program.

?

Report the most recent signal. To allow you to take advantage of the signal handling commands, one of the functions of the debugging stub is to report CPU traps as the corresponding POSIX signal values.

If you have trouble with the serial connection, you can use the command set remotedebug. This makes report on all packets sent back and forth across the serial line to the remote machine. The packet-debugging information is printed on the standard output stream. set remotedebug off turns it off, and show remotedebug shows you its current state.

Using the E7000 in-circuit emulator

You can use the E7000 in-circuit emulator to develop code for either the Hitachi SH or the H8/300H. Use one of these forms of the `target e7000' command to connect to your E7000:

target e7000 port speed

Use this form if your E7000 is connected to a serial port. The port argument identifies what serial port to use (for example, `com2'). The third argument is the line speed in bits per second (for example, `9600').

target e7000 hostname

If your E7000 is installed as a host on a TCP/IP network, you can just specify its hostname; uses telnet to connect.

Special commands for Hitachi micros

Some commands are available only on the H8/300 or the H8/500 configurations:

set machine h8300

set machine h8300h

Condition for one of the two variants of the H8/300 architecture with `set machine'. You can use `show machine' to check which variant is currently in effect.

set memory mod

show memory

Specify which H8/500 memory model (mod) you are using with `set memory'; check which memory model is in effect with `show memory'. The accepted values for mod are small, big, medium, and compact.

target sim

Debug programs on a simulated CPU

After specifying this target, you can debug programs for the simulated CPU in the same style as programs for your host computer; use the file command to load a new program image, the run command to run your program, and so on.

As well as making available all the usual machine registers (see info reg), this debugging target provides three additional items of information as specially named registers:

cycles

Counts clock-ticks in the simulator.

insts

Counts instructions run in the simulator.

time

Execution time in 60ths of a second.

You can refer to these values in expressions with the usual conventions; for example, `b fputc if $cycles>5000' sets a conditional breakpoint that suspends only after at least 5000 simulated clock ticks.

Choosing files

When starts, it reads any arguments other than options as specifying an executable file and core file (or process ID). This is the same as if the arguments were specified by the `-se' and `-c' options respectively. ( reads the first argument that does not have an associated option flag as equivalent to the `-se' option followed by that argument; and the second argument that does not have an associated option flag, if any, as equivalent to the `-c' option followed by that argument.)

Many options have both long and short forms; both are shown in the following list. also recognizes the long forms if you truncate them, so long as enough of the option is present to be unambiguous. (If you prefer, you can flag option arguments with `--' rather than `-', though we illustrate the more usual convention.)

-symbols file

-s file

Read symbol table from file file.

-exec file

-e file

Use file file as the executable file to execute when appropriate, and for examining pure data in conjunction with a core dump.

-se file

Read symbol table from file file and use it as the executable file.

-core file

-c file

Use file file as a core dump to examine.

-c number

Connect to process ID number, as with the attach command (unless there is a file in core-dump format named number, in which case `-c' specifies that file as a core dump to read).

-command file

-x file

Execute commands from file file. See section Command files.

-directory directory

-d directory

Add directory to the path to search for source files.

-m

-mapped

Warning: this option depends on operating system facilities that are not supported on all systems.
If memory-mapped files are available on your system through the mmap system call, you can use this option to have write the symbols from your program into a reusable file in the current directory. If the program you are debugging is called `/tmp/fred', the mapped symbol file is `./fred.syms'. Future debugging sessions notice the presence of this file, and can quickly map in symbol information from it, rather than reading the symbol table from the executable program. The `.syms' file is specific to the host machine where is run. It holds an exact image of the internal symbol table. It cannot be shared across multiple host platforms.

-r

-readnow

Read each symbol file's entire symbol table immediately, rather than the default, which is to read it incrementally as it is needed. This makes startup slower, but makes future operations faster.

The -mapped and -readnow options are typically combined in order to build a `.syms' file that contains complete symbol information. (See section Commands to specify files, for information on `.syms' files.) A simple GDB invocation to do nothing but build a `.syms' file for future use is:

	gdb -batch -nx -mapped -readnow programname

Choosing modes

You can run in various alternative modes--for example, in batch mode or quiet mode.

-nx

-n

Do not execute commands from any initialization files (normally called `'). Normally, the commands in these files are executed after all the command options and arguments have been processed. See section Command files.

-quiet

-q

"Quiet". Do not print the introductory and copyright messages. These messages are also suppressed in batch mode.

-batch

Run in batch mode. Exit with status 0 after processing all the command files specified with `-x' (and all commands from initialization files, if not inhibited with `-n'). Exit with nonzero status if an error occurs in executing the commands in the command files. Batch mode may be useful for running as a filter, for example to download and run a program on another computer; in order to make this more useful, the message

Program exited normally.

(which is ordinarily issued whenever a program running under control terminates) is not issued when running in batch mode.

-cd directory

Run using directory as its working directory, instead of the current directory.

-fullname

-f

Emacs sets this option when it runs as a subprocess. It tells to output the full file name and line number in a standard, recognizable fashion each time a stack frame is displayed (which includes each time your program stops). This recognizable format looks like two `\032' characters, followed by the file name, line number and character position separated by colons, and a newline. The Emacs-to- interface program uses the two `\032' characters as a signal to display the source code for the frame.

Quitting

quit

To exit , use the quit command (abbreviated q), or type an end-of-file character (usually C-d).

An interrupt (often C-c) does not exit from , but rather terminates the action of any command that is in progress and returns to command level. It is safe to type the interrupt character at any time because does not allow it to take effect until a time when it is safe.

If you have been using to control an attached process or device, you can release it with the detach command (see section Debugging an already-running process).

Shell commands

If you need to execute occasional shell commands during your debugging session, there is no need to leave or suspend ; you can just use the shell command.

shell command string

Invoke a the standard shell to execute command string. If it exists, the environment variable SHELL determines which shell to run. Otherwise uses /bin/sh.

The utility make is often needed in development environments. You do not have to use the shell command for this purpose in :

make make-args

Execute the make program with the specified arguments. This is equivalent to `shell make make-args'.

Commands

You can abbreviate a command to the first few letters of the command name, if that abbreviation is unambiguous; and you can repeat certain commands by typing just RET. You can also use the TAB key to get to fill out the rest of a word in a command (or to show you the alternatives available, if there is more than one possibility).

Command syntax

A command is a single line of input. There is no limit on how long it can be. It starts with a command name, which is followed by arguments whose meaning depends on the command name. For example, the command step accepts an argument which is the number of times to step, as in `step 5'. You can also use the step command with no arguments. Some command names do not allow any arguments.

command names may always be truncated if that abbreviation is unambiguous. Other possible command abbreviations are listed in the documentation for individual commands. In some cases, even ambiguous abbreviations are allowed; for example, s is specially defined as equivalent to step even though there are other commands whose names start with s. You can test abbreviations by using them as arguments to the help command.

A blank line as input to (typing just RET) means to repeat the previous command. Certain commands (for example, run) will not repeat this way; these are commands whose unintentional repetition might cause trouble and which you are unlikely to want to repeat.

The list and x commands, when you repeat them with RET, construct new arguments rather than repeating exactly as typed. This permits easy scanning of source or memory.

can also use RET in another way: to partition lengthy output, in a way similar to the common utility more (see section Screen size). Since it is easy to press one RET too many in this situation, disables command repetition after any command that generates this sort of display.

Any text from a # to the end of the line is a comment; it does nothing. This is useful mainly in command files (see section Command files).

Command completion

can fill in the rest of a word in a command for you, if there is only one possibility; it can also show you what the valid possibilities are for the next word in a command, at any time. This works for commands, subcommands, and the names of symbols in your program.

Press the TAB key whenever you want to fill out the rest of a word. If there is only one possibility, fills in the word, and waits for you to finish the command (or press RET to enter it). For example, if you type

() info bre TAB

fills in the rest of the word `breakpoints', since that is the only info subcommand beginning with `bre':

() info breakpoints

You can either press RET at this point, to run the info breakpoints command, or backspace and enter something else, if `breakpoints' does not look like the command you expected. (If you were sure you wanted info breakpoints in the first place, you might as well just type RET immediately after `info bre', to exploit command abbreviations rather than command completion).

If there is more than one possibility for the next word when you press TAB, sounds a bell. You can either supply more characters and try again, or just press TAB a second time; displays all the possible completions for that word. For example, you might want to set a breakpoint on a subroutine whose name begins with `make_', but when you type b make_TAB just sounds the bell. Typing TAB again displays all the function names in your program that begin with those characters, for example:

() b make_ TAB
 sounds bell; press TAB again, to see:
make_a_section_from_file     make_environ               
make_abs_section             make_function_type         
make_blockvector             make_pointer_type          
make_cleanup                 make_reference_type        
make_command                 make_symbol_completion_list
() b make_

After displaying the available possibilities, copies your partial input (`b make_' in the example) so you can finish the command.

If you just want to see the list of alternatives in the first place, you can press M-? rather than pressing TAB twice. M-? means META ?. You can type this either by holding down a key designated as the META shift on your keyboard (if there is one) while typing ?, or as ESC followed by ?.

Sometimes the string you need, while logically a "word", may contain parentheses or other characters that normally excludes from its notion of a word. To permit word completion to work in this situation, you may enclose words in ' (single quote marks) in commands.

The most likely situation where you might need this is in typing the name of a C++ function. This is because C++ allows function overloading (multiple definitions of the same function, distinguished by argument type). For example, when you want to set a breakpoint you may need to distinguish whether you mean the version of name that takes an int parameter, name(int), or the version that takes a float parameter, name(float). To use the word-completion facilities in this situation, type a single quote ' at the beginning of the function name. This alerts that it may need to consider more information than usual when you press TAB or M-? to request word completion:

() b 'bubble( M-?
bubble(double,double)    bubble(int,int)
() b 'bubble(

In some cases, can tell that completing a name requires using quotes. When this happens, inserts the quote for you (while completing as much as it can) if you do not type the quote in the first place:

() b bub TAB
 alters your input line to the following, and rings a bell:
() b 'bubble(

In general, can tell that a quote is needed (and inserts it) if you have not yet started typing the argument list when you ask for completion on an overloaded symbol.

Getting help

You can always ask itself for information on its commands, using the command help.

help

h

You can use help (abbreviated h) with no arguments to display a short list of named classes of commands:

() help
List of classes of commands:

running -- Running the program
stack -- Examining the stack
data -- Examining data
breakpoints -- Making program stop at certain points
files -- Specifying and examining files
status -- Status inquiries
support -- Support facilities
user-defined -- User-defined commands
aliases -- Aliases of other commands
obscure -- Obscure features

Type "help" followed by a class name for a list of 
commands in that class.
Type "help" followed by command name for full 
documentation.
Command name abbreviations are allowed if unambiguous.
()

help class

Using one of the general help classes as an argument, you can get a list of the individual commands in that class. For example, here is the help display for the class status:

() help status
Status inquiries.

List of commands:

show -- Generic command for showing things set
 with "set"
info -- Generic command for printing status

Type "help" followed by command name for full 
documentation.
Command name abbreviations are allowed if unambiguous.
()

help command

With a command name as help argument, displays a short paragraph on how to use that command.

In addition to help, you can use the commands info and show to inquire about the state of your program, or the state of itself. Each command supports many topics of inquiry; this manual introduces each of them in the appropriate context. The listings under info and under show in the Index point to all the sub-commands. See section Index.

info

This command (abbreviated i) is for describing the state of your program. For example, you can list the arguments given to your program with info args, list the registers currently in use with info registers, or list the breakpoints you have set with info breakpoints. You can get a complete list of the info sub-commands with help info.

show

In contrast, show is for describing the state of itself. You can change most of the things you can show, by using the related command set; for example, you can control what number system is used for displays with set radix, or simply inquire which is currently in use with show radix. To display all the settable parameters and their current values, you can use show with no arguments; you may also use info set. Both commands produce the same display.

Here are three miscellaneous show subcommands, all of which are exceptional in lacking corresponding set commands:

show version

Show what version of is running. You should include this information in bug-reports. If multiple versions of are in use at your site, you may occasionally want to determine which version of you are running; as evolves, new commands are introduced, and old ones may wither away. The version number is also announced when you start .

show copying

Display information about permission for copying .

show warranty

Display the GNU "NO WARRANTY" statement.

Running Programs Under

When you run a program under , you must first generate debugging information when you compile it. You may start it with its arguments, if any, in an environment of your choice. You may redirect your program's input and output, debug an already running process, or kill a child process.

Compiling for debugging

In order to debug a program effectively, you need to generate debugging information when you compile it. This debugging information is stored in the object file; it describes the data type of each variable or function and the correspondence between source line numbers and addresses in the executable code.

To request debugging information, specify the `-g' option when you run the compiler.

Many C compilers are unable to handle the `-g' and `-O' options together. Using those compilers, you cannot generate optimized executables containing debugging information.

, the GNU C compiler, supports `-g' with or without `-O', making it possible to debug optimized code. We recommend that you always use `-g' whenever you compile a program. You may think your program is correct, but there is no sense in pushing your luck.

When you debug a program compiled with `-g -O', remember that the optimizer is rearranging your code; the debugger shows you what is really there. Do not be too surprised when the execution path does not exactly match your source file! An extreme example: if you define a variable, but never use it, never sees that variable--because the compiler optimizes it out of existence.

Some things do not work as well with `-g -O' as with just `-g', particularly on machines with instruction scheduling. If in doubt, recompile with `-g' alone, and if this fixes the problem, please report it as a bug (including a test case!).

Older versions of the GNU C compiler permitted a variant option `-gg' for debugging information. no longer supports this format; if your GNU C compiler has this option, do not use it.

Starting your program

run

r

Use the run command to start your program under . You must first specify the program name with an argument to (see section Getting In and Out of), or by using the file or exec-file command (see section Commands to specify files).

If you are running your program in an execution environment that supports processes, run creates an inferior process and makes that process run your program. (In environments without processes, run jumps to the start of your program.)

The execution of a program is affected by certain information it receives from its superior. provides ways to specify this information, which you must do before starting your program. (You can change it after starting your program, but such changes only affect your program the next time you start it.) This information may be divided into four categories:

The arguments.

Specify the arguments to give your program as the arguments of the run command. If a shell is available on your target, the shell is used to pass the arguments, so that you may use normal conventions (such as wildcard expansion or variable substitution) in describing the arguments. In Unix systems, you can control which shell is used with the SHELL environment variable. See section Your program's arguments.

The environment.

Your program normally inherits its environment from , but you can use the commands set environment and unset environment to change parts of the environment that affect your program. See section Your program's environment.

The working directory.

Your program inherits its working directory from . You can set the working directory with the cd command in . See section Your program's working directory.

The standard input and output.

Your program normally uses the same device for standard input and standard output as is using. You can redirect input and output in the run command line, or you can use the tty command to set a different device for your program. See section Your program's input and output. Warning: While input and output redirection work, you cannot use pipes to pass the output of the program you are debugging to another program; if you attempt this, is likely to wind up debugging the wrong program.

When you issue the run command, your program begins to execute immediately. See section Stopping and Continuing, for discussion of how to arrange for your program to stop. Once your program has stopped, you may call functions in your program, using the print or call commands. See section Examining Data.

If the modification time of your symbol file has changed since the last time read its symbols, discards its symbol table, and reads it again. When it does this, tries to retain your current breakpoints.

Your program's arguments

The arguments to your program can be specified by the arguments of the run command. They are passed to a shell, which expands wildcard characters and performs redirection of I/O, and thence to your program. Your SHELL environment variable (if it exists) specifies what shell uses. If you do not define SHELL, uses /bin/sh.

run with no arguments uses the same arguments used by the previous run, or those set by the set args command.

set args

Specify the arguments to be used the next time your program is run. If set args has no arguments, run executes your program with no arguments. Once you have run your program with arguments, using set args before the next run is the only way to run it again without arguments.

show args

Show the arguments to give your program when it is started.

Your program's environment

The environment consists of a set of environment variables and their values. Environment variables conventionally record such things as your user name, your home directory, your terminal type, and your search path for programs to run. Usually you set up environment variables with the shell and they are inherited by all the other programs you run. When debugging, it can be useful to try running your program with a modified environment without having to start over again.

path directory

Add directory to the front of the PATH environment variable (the search path for executables), for both and your program. You may specify several directory names, separated by `:' or whitespace. If directory is already in the path, it is moved to the front, so it is searched sooner. You can use the string `$cwd' to refer to whatever is the current working directory at the time searches the path. If you use `.' instead, it refers to the directory where you executed the path command. replaces `.' in the directory argument (with the current path) before adding directory to the search path.

show paths

Display the list of search paths for executables (the PATH environment variable).

show environment [varname]

Print the value of environment variable varname to be given to your program when it starts. If you do not supply varname, print the names and values of all environment variables to be given to your program. You can abbreviate environment as env.

set environment varname [=] value

Set environment variable varname to value. The value changes for your program only, not for itself. value may be any string; the values of environment variables are just strings, and any interpretation is supplied by your program itself. The value parameter is optional; if it is eliminated, the variable is set to a null value. For example, this command:

set env USER = foo

tells a Unix program, when subsequently run, that its user is named `foo'. (The spaces around `=' are used for clarity here; they are not actually required.)

unset environment varname

Remove variable varname from the environment to be passed to your program. This is different from `set env varname ='; unset environment removes the variable from the environment, rather than assigning it an empty value.

Warning: runs your program using the shell indicated by your SHELL environment variable if it exists (or /bin/sh if not). If your SHELL variable names a shell that runs an initialization file--such as `.cshrc' for C-shell, or `.bashrc' for BASH--any variables you set in that file affect your program. You may wish to move setting of environment variables to files that are only run when you sign on, such as `.login' or `.profile'.

Your program's working directory

Each time you start your program with run, it inherits its working directory from the current working directory of . The working directory is initially whatever it inherited from its parent process (typically the shell), but you can specify a new working directory in with the cd command.

The working directory also serves as a default for the commands that specify files for to operate on. See section Commands to specify files.

cd directory

Set the working directory to directory.

pwd

Print the working directory.

Your program's input and output

By default, the program you run under does input and output to the same terminal that uses. switches the terminal to its own terminal modes to interact with you, but it records the terminal modes your program was using and switches back to them when you continue running your program.

info terminal

Displays information recorded by about the terminal modes your program is using.

You can redirect your program's input and/or output using shell redirection with the run command. For example,

run > outfile

starts your program, diverting its output to the file `outfile'.

Another way to specify where your program should do input and output is with the tty command. This command accepts a file name as argument, and causes this file to be the default for future run commands. It also resets the controlling terminal for the child process, for future run commands. For example,

tty /dev/ttyb

directs that processes started with subsequent run commands default to do input and output on the terminal `/dev/ttyb' and have that as their controlling terminal.

An explicit redirection in run overrides the tty command's effect on the input/output device, but not its effect on the controlling terminal.

When you use the tty command or redirect input in the run command, only the input for your program is affected. The input for still comes from your terminal.

Debugging an already-running process

attach process-id

This command attaches to a running process--one that was started outside . (info files shows your active targets.) The command takes as argument a process ID. The usual way to find out the process-id of a Unix process is with the ps utility, or with the `jobs -l' shell command. attach does not repeat if you press RET a second time after executing the command.

To use attach, your program must be running in an environment which supports processes; for example, attach does not work for programs on bare-board targets that lack an operating system. You must also have permission to send the process a signal.

When using attach, you should first use the file command to specify the program running in the process and load its symbol table. See section Commands to specify files.

The first thing does after arranging to debug the specified process is to stop it. You can examine and modify an attached process with all the commands that are ordinarily available when you start processes with run. You can insert breakpoints; you can step and continue; you can modify storage. If you would rather the process continue running, you may use the continue command after attaching to the process.

detach

When you have finished debugging the attached process, you can use the detach command to release it from control. Detaching the process continues its execution. After the detach command, that process and become completely independent once more, and you are ready to attach another process or start one with run. detach does not repeat if you press RET again after executing the command.

If you exit or use the run command while you have an attached process, you kill that process. By default, asks for confirmation if you try to do either of these things; you can control whether or not you need to confirm by using the set confirm command (see section Optional warnings and messages).

Killing the child process

kill

Kill the child process in which your program is running under .

This command is useful if you wish to debug a core dump instead of a running process. ignores any core dump file while your program is running.

On some operating systems, a program cannot be executed outside while you have breakpoints set on it inside . You can use the kill command in this situation to permit running your program outside the debugger.

The kill command is also useful if you wish to recompile and relink your program, since on many systems it is impossible to modify an executable file while it is running in a process. In this case, when you next type run, notices that the file has changed, and reads the symbol table again (while trying to preserve your current breakpoint settings).

Additional process information

Some operating systems provide a facility called `/proc' that can be used to examine the image of a running process using file-system subroutines. If is configured for an operating system with this facility, the command info proc is available to report on several kinds of information about the process running your program.

info proc

Summarize available information about the process.

info proc mappings

Report on the address ranges accessible in the program, with information on whether your program may read, write, or execute each range.

info proc times

Starting time, user CPU time, and system CPU time for your program and its children.

info proc id

Report on the process IDs related to your program: its own process ID, the ID of its parent, the process group ID, and the session ID.

info proc status

General information on the state of the process. If the process is stopped, this report includes the reason for stopping, and any signal received.

info proc all

Show all the above information about the process.

Debugging programs with multiple threads

In some operating systems, a single program may have more than one thread of execution. The precise semantics of threads differ from one operating system to another, but in general the threads of a single program are akin to multiple processes--except that they share one address space (that is, they can all examine and modify the same variables). On the other hand, each thread has its own registers and execution stack, and perhaps private memory.

provides these facilities for debugging multi-thread programs:

• automatic notification of new threads
• `thread threadno', a command to switch among threads
• `info threads', a command to inquire about existing threads
• thread-specific breakpoints

Warning: These facilities are not yet available on every configuration where the operating system supports threads. If your does not support threads, these commands have no effect. For example, a system without thread support shows no output from `info threads', and always rejects the thread command, like this:

() info threads
() thread 1
Thread ID 1 not known.  Use the "info threads" command to
see the IDs of currently known threads.

The thread debugging facility allows you to observe all threads while your program runs--but whenever takes control, one thread in particular is always the focus of debugging. This thread is called the current thread. Debugging commands show program information from the perspective of the current thread.

Whenever detects a new thread in your program, it displays the target system's identification for the thread with a message in the form `[New systag]'. systag is a thread identifier whose form varies depending on the particular system. For example, on LynxOS, you might see

[New process 35 thread 27]

when notices a new thread. In contrast, on an SGI system, the systag is simply something like `process 368', with no further qualifier.

For debugging purposes, associates its own thread number--always a single integer--with each thread in your program.

info threads

Display a summary of all threads currently in your program. displays for each thread (in this order):

the thread number assigned by
the target system's thread identifier (systag)
the current stack frame summary for that thread

An asterisk `*' to the left of the thread number indicates the current thread. For example,

() info threads
  3 process 35 thread 27  0x34e5 in sigpause ()
  2 process 35 thread 23  0x34e5 in sigpause ()
* 1 process 35 thread 13  main (argc=1, argv=0x7ffffff8)
    at threadtest.c:68

thread threadno

Make thread number threadno the current thread. The command argument threadno is the internal thread number, as shown in the first field of the `info threads' display. responds by displaying the system identifier of the thread you selected, and its current stack frame summary:

() thread 2
[Switching to process 35 thread 23]
0x34e5 in sigpause ()

As with the `[New ...]' message, the form of the text after `Switching to' depends on your system's conventions for identifying threads.

Whenever stops your program, due to a breakpoint or a signal, it automatically selects the thread where that breakpoint or signal happened. alerts you to the context switch with a message of the form `[Switching to systag]' to identify the thread.

See section Stopping and starting multi-thread programs, for more information about how behaves when you stop and start programs with multiple threads.

See section Setting watchpoints, for information about watchpoints in programs with multiple threads.

Debugging programs with multiple processes

has no special support for debugging programs which create additional processes using the fork function. When a program forks, will continue to debug the parent process and the child process will run unimpeded. If you have set a breakpoint in any code which the child then executes, the child will get a SIGTRAP signal which (unless it catches the signal) will cause it to terminate.

However, if you want to debug the child process there is a workaround which isn't too painful. Put a call to sleep in the code which the child process executes after the fork. It may be useful to sleep only if a certain environment variable is set, or a certain file exists, so that the delay need not occur when you don't want to run on the child. While the child is sleeping, use the ps program to get its process ID. Then tell (a new invocation of if you are also debugging the parent process) to attach to the child process (see section Debugging an already-running process). From that point on you can debug the child process just like any other process which you attached to.

Stopping and Continuing

The principal purposes of using a debugger are so that you can stop your program before it terminates; or so that, if your program runs into trouble, you can investigate and find out why.

Inside , your program may stop for any of several reasons, such as a signal, a breakpoint, or reaching a new line after a command such as step. You may then examine and change variables, set new breakpoints or remove old ones, and then continue execution. Usually, the messages shown by provide ample explanation of the status of your program--but you can also explicitly request this information at any time.

info program

Display information about the status of your program: whether it is running or not, what process it is, and why it stopped.

Breakpoints, watchpoints, and exceptions

A breakpoint makes your program stop whenever a certain point in the program is reached. For each breakpoint, you can add conditions to control in finer detail whether your program stops. You can set breakpoints with the break command and its variants (see section Setting breakpoints), to specify the place where your program should stop by line number, function name or exact address in the program. In languages with exception handling (such as GNU C++), you can also set breakpoints where an exception is raised (see section Breakpoints and exceptions).

A watchpoint is a special breakpoint that stops your program when the value of an expression changes. You must use a different command to set watchpoints (see section Setting watchpoints), but aside from that, you can manage a watchpoint like any other breakpoint: you enable, disable, and delete both breakpoints and watchpoints using the same commands.

You can arrange to have values from your program displayed automatically whenever stops at a breakpoint. See section Automatic display.

assigns a number to each breakpoint or watchpoint when you create it; these numbers are successive integers starting with one. In many of the commands for controlling various features of breakpoints you use the breakpoint number to say which breakpoint you want to change. Each breakpoint may be enabled or disabled; if disabled, it has no effect on your program until you enable it again.

Setting breakpoints

Breakpoints are set with the break command (abbreviated b). The debugger convenience variable `$bpnum' records the number of the beakpoint you've set most recently; see section Convenience variables, for a discussion of what you can do with convenience variables.

You have several ways to say where the breakpoint should go.

break function

Set a breakpoint at entry to function function. When using source languages that permit overloading of symbols, such as C++, function may refer to more than one possible place to break. See section Breakpoint menus, for a discussion of that situation.

break +offset

break -offset

Set a breakpoint some number of lines forward or back from the position at which execution stopped in the currently selected frame.

break linenum

Set a breakpoint at line linenum in the current source file. That file is the last file whose source text was printed. This breakpoint stops your program just before it executes any of the code on that line.

break filename:linenum

Set a breakpoint at line linenum in source file filename.

break filename:function

Set a breakpoint at entry to function function found in file filename. Specifying a file name as well as a function name is superfluous except when multiple files contain similarly named functions.

break *address

Set a breakpoint at address address. You can use this to set breakpoints in parts of your program which do not have debugging information or source files.

break

When called without any arguments, break sets a breakpoint at the next instruction to be executed in the selected stack frame (see section Examining the Stack). In any selected frame but the innermost, this makes your program stop as soon as control returns to that frame. This is similar to the effect of a finish command in the frame inside the selected frame--except that finish does not leave an active breakpoint. If you use break without an argument in the innermost frame, stops the next time it reaches the current location; this may be useful inside loops. normally ignores breakpoints when it resumes execution, until at least one instruction has been executed. If it did not do this, you would be unable to proceed past a breakpoint without first disabling the breakpoint. This rule applies whether or not the breakpoint already existed when your program stopped.

break ... if cond

Set a breakpoint with condition cond; evaluate the expression cond each time the breakpoint is reached, and stop only if the value is nonzero--that is, if cond evaluates as true. `...' stands for one of the possible arguments described above (or no argument) specifying where to break. See section Break conditions, for more information on breakpoint conditions.

tbreak args

Set a breakpoint enabled only for one stop. args are the same as for the break command, and the breakpoint is set in the same way, but the breakpoint is automatically deleted after the first time your program stops there. See section Disabling breakpoints.

rbreak regex

Set breakpoints on all functions matching the regular expression regex. This command sets an unconditional breakpoint on all matches, printing a list of all breakpoints it set. Once these breakpoints are set, they are treated just like the breakpoints set with the break command. You can delete them, disable them, or make them conditional the same way as any other breakpoint. When debugging C++ programs, rbreak is useful for setting breakpoints on overloaded functions that are not members of any special classes.

info breakpoints [n]

info break [n]

info watchpoints [n]

Print a table of all breakpoints and watchpoints set and not deleted, with the following columns for each breakpoint:

Breakpoint Numbers

Type

Breakpoint or watchpoint.

Disposition

Whether the breakpoint is marked to be disabled or deleted when hit.

Enabled or Disabled

Enabled breakpoints are marked with `y'. `n' marks breakpoints that are not enabled.

Address

Where the breakpoint is in your program, as a memory address

What

Where the breakpoint is in the source for your program, as a file and line number.

If a breakpoint is conditional, info break shows the condition on the line following the affected breakpoint; breakpoint commands, if any, are listed after that. info break with a breakpoint number n as argument lists only that breakpoint. The convenience variable $_ and the default examining-address for the x command are set to the address of the last breakpoint listed (see section Examining memory).

allows you to set any number of breakpoints at the same place in your program. There is nothing silly or meaningless about this. When the breakpoints are conditional, this is even useful (see section Break conditions).

itself sometimes sets breakpoints in your program for special purposes, such as proper handling of longjmp (in C programs). These internal breakpoints are assigned negative numbers, starting with -1; `info breakpoints' does not display them.

You can see these breakpoints with the maintenance command `maint info breakpoints'.

maint info breakpoints

Using the same format as `info breakpoints', display both the breakpoints you've set explicitly, and those is using for internal purposes. Internal breakpoints are shown with negative breakpoint numbers. The type column identifies what kind of breakpoint is shown:

breakpoint

Normal, explicitly set breakpoint.

watchpoint

Normal, explicitly set watchpoint.

longjmp

Internal breakpoint, used to handle correctly stepping through longjmp calls.

longjmp resume

Internal breakpoint at the target of a longjmp.

until

Temporary internal breakpoint used by the until command.

finish

Temporary internal breakpoint used by the finish command.

Setting watchpoints

You can use a watchpoint to stop execution whenever the value of an expression changes, without having to predict a particular place where this may happen.

Watchpoints currently execute two orders of magnitude more slowly than other breakpoints, but this can be well worth it to catch errors where you have no clue what part of your program is the culprit.

Some processors provide special hardware to support watchpoint evaluation; will use such hardware if it is available, and if the support code has been added for that configuration.

watch expr

Set a watchpoint for an expression.

info watchpoints

This command prints a list of watchpoints and breakpoints; it is the same as info break.

Warning: in multi-thread programs, watchpoints have only limited usefulness. With the current watchpoint implementation, can only watch the value of an expression in a single thread. If you are confident that the expression can only change due to the current thread's activity (and if you are also confident that no other thread can become current), then you can use watchpoints as usual. However, may not notice when a non-current thread's activity changes the expression.

Breakpoints and exceptions

Some languages, such as GNU C++, implement exception handling. You can use to examine what caused your program to raise an exception, and to list the exceptions your program is prepared to handle at a given point in time.

catch exceptions

You can set breakpoints at active exception handlers by using the catch command. exceptions is a list of names of exceptions to catch.

You can use info catch to list active exception handlers. See section Information about a frame.

There are currently some limitations to exception handling in :

• If you call a function interactively, normally returns control to you when the function has finished executing. If the call raises an exception, however, the call may bypass the mechanism that returns control to you and cause your program to simply continue running until it hits a breakpoint, catches a signal that is listening for, or exits.
• You cannot raise an exception interactively.
• You cannot install an exception handler interactively.

Sometimes catch is not the best way to debug exception handling: if you need to know exactly where an exception is raised, it is better to stop before the exception handler is called, since that way you can see the stack before any unwinding takes place. If you set a breakpoint in an exception handler instead, it may not be easy to find out where the exception was raised.

To stop just before an exception handler is called, you need some knowledge of the implementation. In the case of GNU C++, exceptions are raised by calling a library function named __raise_exception which has the following ANSI C interface:

    /* addr is where the exception identifier is stored.
       ID is the exception identifier.  */
    void __raise_exception (void **addr, void *id);

To make the debugger catch all exceptions before any stack unwinding takes place, set a breakpoint on __raise_exception (see section Breakpoints, watchpoints, and exceptions).

With a conditional breakpoint (see section Break conditions) that depends on the value of id, you can stop your program when a specific exception is raised. You can use multiple conditional breakpoints to stop your program when any of a number of exceptions are raised.

Deleting breakpoints

It is often necessary to eliminate a breakpoint or watchpoint once it has done its job and you no longer want your program to stop there. This is called deleting the breakpoint. A breakpoint that has been deleted no longer exists; it is forgotten.

With the clear command you can delete breakpoints according to where they are in your program. With the delete command you can delete individual breakpoints or watchpoints by specifying their breakpoint numbers.

It is not necessary to delete a breakpoint to proceed past it. automatically ignores breakpoints on the first instruction to be executed when you continue execution without changing the execution address.

clear

Delete any breakpoints at the next instruction to be executed in the selected stack frame (see section Selecting a frame). When the innermost frame is selected, this is a good way to delete a breakpoint where your program just stopped.

clear function

clear filename:function

Delete any breakpoints set at entry to the function function.

clear linenum

clear filename:linenum

Delete any breakpoints set at or within the code of the specified line.

delete [breakpoints] [bnums...]

Delete the breakpoints or watchpoints of the numbers specified as arguments. If no argument is specified, delete all breakpoints ( asks confirmation, unless you have set confirm off). You can abbreviate this command as d.

Disabling breakpoints

Rather than deleting a breakpoint or watchpoint, you might prefer to disable it. This makes the breakpoint inoperative as if it had been deleted, but remembers the information on the breakpoint so that you can enable it again later.

You disable and enable breakpoints and watchpoints with the enable and disable commands, optionally specifying one or more breakpoint numbers as arguments. Use info break or info watch to print a list of breakpoints or watchpoints if you do not know which numbers to use.

A breakpoint or watchpoint can have any of four different states of enablement:

• Enabled. The breakpoint stops your program. A breakpoint set with the break command starts out in this state.
• Disabled. The breakpoint has no effect on your program.
• Enabled once. The breakpoint stops your program, but then becomes disabled. A breakpoint set with the tbreak command starts out in this state.
• Enabled for deletion. The breakpoint stops your program, but immediately after it does so it is deleted permanently.

You can use the following commands to enable or disable breakpoints and watchpoints:

disable [breakpoints] [bnums...]

Disable the specified breakpoints--or all breakpoints, if none are listed. A disabled breakpoint has no effect but is not forgotten. All options such as ignore-counts, conditions and commands are remembered in case the breakpoint is enabled again later. You may abbreviate disable as dis.

enable [breakpoints] [bnums...]

Enable the specified breakpoints (or all defined breakpoints). They become effective once again in stopping your program.

enable [breakpoints] once bnums...

Enable the specified breakpoints temporarily. disables any of these breakpoints immediately after stopping your program.

enable [breakpoints] delete bnums...

Enable the specified breakpoints to work once, then die. deletes any of these breakpoints as soon as your program stops there.

Save for a breakpoint set with tbreak (see section Setting breakpoints), breakpoints that you set are initially enabled; subsequently, they become disabled or enabled only when you use one of the commands above. (The command until can set and delete a breakpoint of its own, but it does not change the state of your other breakpoints; see section Continuing and stepping.)

Break conditions

The simplest sort of breakpoint breaks every time your program reaches a specified place. You can also specify a condition for a breakpoint. A condition is just a Boolean expression in your programming language (see section Expressions). A breakpoint with a condition evaluates the expression each time your program reaches it, and your program stops only if the condition is true.

This is the converse of using assertions for program validation; in that situation, you want to stop when the assertion is violated--that is, when the condition is false. In C, if you want to test an assertion expressed by the condition assert, you should set the condition `! assert' on the appropriate breakpoint.

Conditions are also accepted for watchpoints; you may not need them, since a watchpoint is inspecting the value of an expression anyhow--but it might be simpler, say, to just set a watchpoint on a variable name, and specify a condition that tests whether the new value is an interesting one.

Break conditions can have side effects, and may even call functions in your program. This can be useful, for example, to activate functions that log program progress, or to use your own print functions to format special data structures. The effects are completely predictable unless there is another enabled breakpoint at the same address. (In that case, might see the other breakpoint first and stop your program without checking the condition of this one.) Note that breakpoint commands are usually more convenient and flexible for the purpose of performing side effects when a breakpoint is reached (see section Breakpoint command lists).

Break conditions can be specified when a breakpoint is set, by using `if' in the arguments to the break command. See section Setting breakpoints. They can also be changed at any time with the condition command. The watch command does not recognize the if keyword; condition is the only way to impose a further condition on a watchpoint.

condition bnum expression

Specify expression as the break condition for breakpoint or watchpoint number bnum. After you set a condition, breakpoint bnum stops your program only if the value of expression is true (nonzero, in C). When you use condition, checks expression immediately for syntactic correctness, and to determine whether symbols in it have referents in the context of your breakpoint. does not actually evaluate expression at the time the condition command is given, however. See section Expressions.

condition bnum

Remove the condition from breakpoint number bnum. It becomes an ordinary unconditional breakpoint.

A special case of a breakpoint condition is to stop only when the breakpoint has been reached a certain number of times. This is so useful that there is a special way to do it, using the ignore count of the breakpoint. Every breakpoint has an ignore count, which is an integer. Most of the time, the ignore count is zero, and therefore has no effect. But if your program reaches a breakpoint whose ignore count is positive, then instead of stopping, it just decrements the ignore count by one and continues. As a result, if the ignore count value is n, the breakpoint does not stop the next n times your program reaches it.

ignore bnum count

Set the ignore count of breakpoint number bnum to count. The next count times the breakpoint is reached, your program's execution does not stop; other than to decrement the ignore count, takes no action. To make the breakpoint stop the next time it is reached, specify a count of zero. When you use continue to resume execution of your program from a breakpoint, you can specify an ignore count directly as an argument to continue, rather than using ignore. See section Continuing and stepping. If a breakpoint has a positive ignore count and a condition, the condition is not checked. Once the ignore count reaches zero, resumes checking the condition. You could achieve the effect of the ignore count with a condition such as `$foo-- <= 0' using a debugger convenience variable that is decremented each time. See section Convenience variables.

Breakpoint command lists

You can give any breakpoint (or watchpoint) a series of commands to execute when your program stops due to that breakpoint. For example, you might want to print the values of certain expressions, or enable other breakpoints.

commands [bnum]

... command-list ...

end

Specify a list of commands for breakpoint number bnum. The commands themselves appear on the following lines. Type a line containing just end to terminate the commands. To remove all commands from a breakpoint, type commands and follow it immediately with end; that is, give no commands. With no bnum argument, commands refers to the last breakpoint or watchpoint set (not to the breakpoint most recently encountered).

Pressing RET as a means of repeating the last command is disabled within a command-list.

You can use breakpoint commands to start your program up again. Simply use the continue command, or step, or any other command that resumes execution.

Any other commands in the command list, after a command that resumes execution, are ignored. This is because any time you resume execution (even with a simple next or step), you may encounter another breakpoint--which could have its own command list, leading to ambiguities about which list to execute.

If the first command you specify in a command list is silent, the usual message about stopping at a breakpoint is not printed. This may be desirable for breakpoints that are to print a specific message and then continue. If none of the remaining commands print anything, you see no sign that the breakpoint was reached. silent is meaningful only at the beginning of a breakpoint command list.

The commands echo, output, and printf allow you to print precisely controlled output, and are often useful in silent breakpoints. See section Commands for controlled output.

For example, here is how you could use breakpoint commands to print the value of x at entry to foo whenever x is positive.

break foo if x>0
commands
silent
printf "x is %d\n",x
cont
end

One application for breakpoint commands is to compensate for one bug so you can test for another. Put a breakpoint just after the erroneous line of code, give it a condition to detect the case in which something erroneous has been done, and give it commands to assign correct values to any variables that need them. End with the continue command so that your program does not stop, and start with the silent command so that no output is produced. Here is an example:

break 403
commands
silent
set x = y + 4
cont
end

Breakpoint menus

Some programming languages (notably C++) permit a single function name to be defined several times, for application in different contexts. This is called overloading. When a function name is overloaded, `break function' is not enough to tell where you want a breakpoint. If you realize this is a problem, you can use something like `break function(types)' to specify which particular version of the function you want. Otherwise, offers you a menu of numbered choices for different possible breakpoints, and waits for your selection with the prompt `>'. The first two options are always `[0] cancel' and `[1] all'. Typing 1 sets a breakpoint at each definition of function, and typing 0 aborts the break command without setting any new breakpoints.

For example, the following session excerpt shows an attempt to set a breakpoint at the overloaded symbol String::after. We choose three particular definitions of that function name:

() b String::after
[0] cancel
[1] all
[2] file:String.cc; line number:867
[3] file:String.cc; line number:860
[4] file:String.cc; line number:875
[5] file:String.cc; line number:853
[6] file:String.cc; line number:846
[7] file:String.cc; line number:735
> 2 4 6
Breakpoint 1 at 0xb26c: file String.cc, line 867.
Breakpoint 2 at 0xb344: file String.cc, line 875.
Breakpoint 3 at 0xafcc: file String.cc, line 846.
Multiple breakpoints were set.
Use the "delete" command to delete unwanted
 breakpoints.
()

"Cannot insert breakpoints"

Under some operating systems, breakpoints cannot be used in a program if any other process is running that program. In this situation, attempting to run or continue a program with a breakpoint causes to stop the other process.

When this happens, you have three ways to proceed:

1. Remove or disable the breakpoints, then continue.
2. Suspend , and copy the file containing your program to a new name. Resume and use the exec-file command to specify that should run your program under that name. Then start your program again.
3. Relink your program so that the text segment is nonsharable, using the linker option `-N'. The operating system limitation may not apply to nonsharable executables.

Continuing and stepping

Continuing means resuming program execution until your program completes normally. In contrast, stepping means executing just one more "step" of your program, where "step" may mean either one line of source code, or one machine instruction (depending on what particular command you use). Either when continuing or when stepping, your program may stop even sooner, due to a breakpoint or a signal. (If due to a signal, you may want to use handle, or use `signal 0' to resume execution. @xref{Signals, ,Signals}.)

continue [ignore-count]

c [ignore-count]

fg [ignore-count]

Resume program execution, at the address where your program last stopped; any breakpoints set at that address are bypassed. The optional argument ignore-count allows you to specify a further number of times to ignore a breakpoint at this location; its effect is like that of ignore (see section Break conditions). The argument ignore-count is meaningful only when your program stopped due to a breakpoint. At other times, the argument to continue is ignored. The synonyms c and fg are provided purely for convenience, and have exactly the same behavior as continue.

To resume execution at a different place, you can use return (see section Returning from a function) to go back to the calling function; or jump (see section Continuing at a different address) to go to an arbitrary location in your program.

A typical technique for using stepping is to set a breakpoint (see section Breakpoints, watchpoints, and exceptions) at the beginning of the function or the section of your program where a problem is believed to lie, run your program until it stops at that breakpoint, and then step through the suspect area, examining the variables that are interesting, until you see the problem happen.

step

Continue running your program until control reaches a different source line, then stop it and return control to . This command is abbreviated s.

Warning: If you use the step command while control is within a function that was compiled without debugging information, execution proceeds until control reaches a function that does have debugging information. Likewise, it will not step into a function which is compiled without debugging information. To step through functions without debugging information, use the stepi command, described below.

step count

Continue running as in step, but do so count times. If a breakpoint is reached, or a signal not related to stepping occurs before count steps, stepping stops right away.

next [count]

Continue to the next source line in the current (innermost) stack frame. Similar to step, but any function calls appearing within the line of code are executed without stopping. Execution stops when control reaches a different line of code at the stack level which was executing when the next command was given. This command is abbreviated n. An argument count is a repeat count, as for step. next within a function that lacks debugging information acts like step, but any function calls appearing within the code of the function are executed without stopping.

finish

Continue running until just after function in the selected stack frame returns. Print the returned value (if any). Contrast this with the return command (see section Returning from a function).

until

u

Continue running until a source line past the current line, in the current stack frame, is reached. This command is used to avoid single stepping through a loop more than once. It is like the next command, except that when until encounters a jump, it automatically continues execution until the program counter is greater than the address of the jump. This means that when you reach the end of a loop after single stepping though it, until makes your program continue execution until it exits the loop. In contrast, a next command at the end of a loop simply steps back to the beginning of the loop, which forces you to step through the next iteration. until always stops your program if it attempts to exit the current stack frame. until may produce somewhat counterintuitive results if the order of machine code does not match the order of the source lines. For example, in the following excerpt from a debugging session, the f (frame) command shows that execution is stopped at line 206; yet when we use until, we get to line 195:

() f
#0  main (argc=4, argv=0xf7fffae8) at m4.c:206
206                 expand_input();
() until
195             for ( ; argc > 0; NEXTARG) {

This happened because, for execution efficiency, the compiler had generated code for the loop closure test at the end, rather than the start, of the loop--even though the test in a C for-loop is written before the body of the loop. The until command appeared to step back to the beginning of the loop when it advanced to this expression; however, it has not really gone to an earlier statement--not in terms of the actual machine code. until with no argument works by means of single instruction stepping, and hence is slower than until with an argument.

until location

u location

Continue running your program until either the specified location is reached, or the current stack frame returns. location is any of the forms of argument acceptable to break (see section Setting breakpoints). This form of the command uses breakpoints, and hence is quicker than until without an argument.

stepi

si

Execute one machine instruction, then stop and return to the debugger. It is often useful to do `display/i $pc' when stepping by machine instructions. This makes automatically display the next instruction to be executed, each time your program stops. See section Automatic display. An argument is a repeat count, as in step.

nexti

ni

Execute one machine instruction, but if it is a function call, proceed until the function returns. An argument is a repeat count, as in next.

Stopping and starting multi-thread programs

When your program has multiple threads (see section Debugging programs with multiple threads), you can choose whether to set breakpoints on all threads, or on a particular thread.

break linespec thread threadno

break linespec thread threadno if ...

Use the qualifier `thread threadno' with a breakpoint command to specify that you only want to stop the program when a particular thread reaches this breakpoint. threadno is one of the numeric thread identifiers assigned by , shown in the first column of the `info threads' display. If you do not specify `thread threadno' when you set a breakpoint, the breakpoint applies to all threads of your program. You can use the thread qualifier on conditional breakpoints as well; in this case, place `thread threadno' before the breakpoint condition, like this:

(gdb) break frik.c:13 thread 28 if bartab > lim

Whenever your program stops under for any reason, all threads of execution stop, not just the current thread. This allows you to examine the overall state of the program, including switching between threads, without worrying that things may change underfoot.

Conversely, whenever you restart the program, all threads start executing. This is true even when single-stepping with commands like step or next.

In particular, cannot single-step all threads in lockstep. Since thread scheduling is up to your debugging target's operating system (not controlled by ), other threads may execute more than one statement while the current thread completes a single step. Moreover, in general other threads stop in the middle of a statement, rather than at a clean statement boundary, when the program stops.

You might even find your program stopped in another thread after continuing or even single-stepping. This happens whenever some other thread runs into a breakpoint, a signal, or an exception before the first thread completes whatever you requested.

Examining the Stack

When your program has stopped, the first thing you need to know is where it stopped and how it got there.

Each time your program performs a function call, the information about where in your program the call was made from is saved in a block of data called a stack frame. The frame also contains the arguments of the call and the local variables of the function that was called. All the stack frames are allocated in a region of memory called the call stack.

When your program stops, the commands for examining the stack allow you to see all of this information.

One of the stack frames is selected by and many commands refer implicitly to the selected frame. In particular, whenever you ask for the value of a variable in your program, the value is found in the selected frame. There are special commands to select whichever frame you are interested in.

When your program stops, automatically selects the currently executing frame and describes it briefly as the frame command does (see section Information about a frame).

Stack frames

The call stack is divided up into contiguous pieces called stack frames, or frames for short; each frame is the data associated with one call to one function. The frame contains the arguments given to the function, the function's local variables, and the address at which the function is executing.

When your program is started, the stack has only one frame, that of the function main. This is called the initial frame or the outermost frame. Each time a function is called, a new frame is made. Each time a function returns, the frame for that function invocation is eliminated. If a function is recursive, there can be many frames for the same function. The frame for the function in which execution is actually occurring is called the innermost frame. This is the most recently created of all the stack frames that still exist.

Inside your program, stack frames are identified by their addresses. A stack frame consists of many bytes, each of which has its own address; each kind of computer has a convention for choosing one of those bytes whose address serves as the address of the frame. Usually this address is kept in a register called the frame pointer register while execution is going on in that frame.

assigns numbers to all existing stack frames, starting with zero for the innermost frame, one for the frame that called it, and so on upward. These numbers do not really exist in your program; they are assigned by to give you a way of designating stack frames in commands.

Some compilers provide a way to compile functions so that they operate without stack frames. (For example, the option `-fomit-frame-pointer' generates functions without a frame.) This is occasionally done with heavily used library functions to save the frame setup time. has limited facilities for dealing with these function invocations. If the innermost function invocation has no stack frame, nevertheless regards it as though it had a separate frame, which is numbered zero as usual, allowing correct tracing of the function call chain. However, has no provision for frameless functions elsewhere in the stack.

Backtraces

A backtrace is a summary of how your program got where it is. It shows one line per frame, for many frames, starting with the currently executing frame (frame zero), followed by its caller (frame one), and on up the stack.

backtrace

bt

Print a backtrace of the entire stack: one line per frame for all frames in the stack. You can stop the backtrace at any time by typing the system interrupt character, normally C-c.

backtrace n

bt n

Similar, but print only the innermost n frames.

backtrace -n

bt -n

Similar, but print only the outermost n frames.

The names where and info stack (abbreviated info s) are additional aliases for backtrace.

Each line in the backtrace shows the frame number and the function name. The program counter value is also shown--unless you use set print address off. The backtrace also shows the source file name and line number, as well as the arguments to the function. The program counter value is omitted if it is at the beginning of the code for that line number.

Here is an example of a backtrace. It was made with the command `bt 3', so it shows the innermost three frames.

#0  m4_traceon (obs=0x24eb0, argc=1, argv=0x2b8c8) 
    at builtin.c:993
#1  0x6e38 in expand_macro (sym=0x2b600) at macro.c:242
#2  0x6840 in expand_token (obs=0x0, t=177664, td=0xf7fffb08)
    at macro.c:71
(More stack frames follow...)

The display for frame zero does not begin with a program counter value, indicating that your program has stopped at the beginning of the code for line 993 of builtin.c.

Selecting a frame

Most commands for examining the stack and other data in your program work on whichever stack frame is selected at the moment. Here are the commands for selecting a stack frame; all of them finish by printing a brief description of the stack frame just selected.

frame n

f n

Select frame number n. Recall that frame zero is the innermost (currently executing) frame, frame one is the frame that called the innermost one, and so on. The highest-numbered frame is the one for main.

frame addr

f addr

Select the frame at address addr. This is useful mainly if the chaining of stack frames has been damaged by a bug, making it impossible for to assign numbers properly to all frames. In addition, this can be useful when your program has multiple stacks and switches between them. On the SPARC architecture, frame needs two addresses to select an arbitrary frame: a frame pointer and a stack pointer. On the MIPS and Alpha architecture, it needs two addresses: a stack pointer and a program counter. On the 29k architecture, it needs three addresses: a register stack pointer, a program counter, and a memory stack pointer.

up n

Move n frames up the stack. For positive numbers n, this advances toward the outermost frame, to higher frame numbers, to frames that have existed longer. n defaults to one.

down n

Move n frames down the stack. For positive numbers n, this advances toward the innermost frame, to lower frame numbers, to frames that were created more recently. n defaults to one. You may abbreviate down as do.

All of these commands end by printing two lines of output describing the frame. The first line shows the frame number, the function name, the arguments, and the source file and line number of execution in that frame. The second line shows the text of that source line.

For example:

() up
#1  0x22f0 in main (argc=1, argv=0xf7fffbf4, env=0xf7fffbfc)
    at env.c:10
10              read_input_file (argv[i]);

After such a printout, the list command with no arguments prints ten lines centered on the point of execution in the frame. See section Printing source lines.

up-silently n

down-silently n

These two commands are variants of up and down, respectively; they differ in that they do their work silently, without causing display of the new frame. They are intended primarily for use in command scripts, where the output might be unnecessary and distracting.

Information about a frame

There are several other commands to print information about the selected stack frame.

frame

f

When used without any argument, this command does not change which frame is selected, but prints a brief description of the currently selected stack frame. It can be abbreviated f. With an argument, this command is used to select a stack frame. See section Selecting a frame.

info frame

info f

This command prints a verbose description of the selected stack frame, including the address of the frame, the addresses of the next frame down (called by this frame) and the next frame up (caller of this frame), the language that the source code corresponding to this frame was written in, the address of the frame's arguments, the program counter saved in it (the address of execution in the caller frame), and which registers were saved in the frame. The verbose description is useful when something has gone wrong that has made the stack format fail to fit the usual conventions.

info frame addr

info f addr

Print a verbose description of the frame at address addr, without selecting that frame. The selected frame remains unchanged by this command. This requires the same kind of address (more than one for some architectures) that you specify in the frame command. See section Selecting a frame.

info args

Print the arguments of the selected frame, each on a separate line.

info locals

Print the local variables of the selected frame, each on a separate line. These are all variables (declared either static or automatic) accessible at the point of execution of the selected frame.

info catch

Print a list of all the exception handlers that are active in the current stack frame at the current point of execution. To see other exception handlers, visit the associated frame (using the up, down, or frame commands); then type info catch. See section Breakpoints and exceptions.

Examining Source Files

can print parts of your program's source, since the debugging information recorded in the program tells what source files were used to build it. When your program stops, spontaneously prints the line where it stopped. Likewise, when you select a stack frame (see section Selecting a frame), prints the line where execution in that frame has stopped. You can print other portions of source files by explicit command.

If you use through its GNU Emacs interface, you may prefer to use Emacs facilities to view source; see section Using under GNU Emacs.

Printing source lines

To print lines from a source file, use the list command (abbreviated l). There are several ways to specify what part of the file you want to print.

Here are the forms of the list command most commonly used:

list linenum

Print lines centered around line number linenum in the current source file.

list function

Print lines centered around the beginning of function function.

list

Print more lines. If the last lines printed were printed with a list command, this prints lines following the last lines printed; however, if the last line printed was a solitary line printed as part of displaying a stack frame (see section Examining the Stack), this prints lines centered around that line.

list -

Print lines just before the lines last printed.

By default, prints ten source lines with any of these forms of the list command. You can change this using set listsize:

set listsize count

Make the list command display count source lines (unless the list argument explicitly specifies some other number).

show listsize

Display the number of lines that list prints.

Repeating a list command with RET discards the argument, so it is equivalent to typing just list. This is more useful than listing the same lines again. An exception is made for an argument of `-'; that argument is preserved in repetition so that each repetition moves up in the source file.

In general, the list command expects you to supply zero, one or two linespecs. Linespecs specify source lines; there are several ways of writing them but the effect is always to specify some source line. Here is a complete description of the possible arguments for list:

list linespec

Print lines centered around the line specified by linespec.

list first,last

Print lines from first to last. Both arguments are linespecs.

list ,last

Print lines ending with last.

list first,

Print lines starting with first.

list +

Print lines just after the lines last printed.

list -

Print lines just before the lines last printed.

list

As described in the preceding table.

Here are the ways of specifying a single source line--all the kinds of linespec.

number

Specifies line number of the current source file. When a list command has two linespecs, this refers to the same source file as the first linespec.

+offset

Specifies the line offset lines after the last line printed. When used as the second linespec in a list command that has two, this specifies the line offset lines down from the first linespec.

-offset

Specifies the line offset lines before the last line printed.

filename:number

Specifies line number in the source file filename.

function

Specifies the line of the open-brace that begins the body of the function function.

filename:function

Specifies the line of the open-brace that begins the body of the function function in the file filename. You only need the file name with a function name to avoid ambiguity when there are identically named functions in different source files.

*address

Specifies the line containing the program address address. address may be any expression.

Searching source files

There are two commands for searching through the current source file for a regular expression.

forward-search regexp

search regexp

The command `forward-search regexp' checks each line, starting with the one following the last line listed, for a match for regexp. It lists the line that is found. You can use synonym `search regexp' or abbreviate the command name as fo.

reverse-search regexp

The command `reverse-search regexp' checks each line, starting with the one before the last line listed and going backward, for a match for regexp. It lists the line that is found. You can abbreviate this command as rev.

Specifying source directories

Executable programs sometimes do not record the directories of the source files from which they were compiled, just the names. Even when they do, the directories could be moved between the compilation and your debugging session. has a list of directories to search for source files; this is called the source path. Each time wants a source file, it tries all the directories in the list, in the order they are present in the list, until it finds a file with the desired name. Note that the executable search path is not used for this purpose. Neither is the current working directory, unless it happens to be in the source path.

If cannot find a source file in the source path, and the object program records a directory, tries that directory too. If the source path is empty, and there is no record of the compilation directory, looks in the current directory as a last resort.

Whenever you reset or rearrange the source path, clears out any information it has cached about where source files are found and where each line is in the file.

When you start , its source path is empty. To add other directories, use the directory command.

directory dirname ...

Add directory dirname to the front of the source path. Several directory names may be given to this command, separated by `:' or whitespace. You may specify a directory that is already in the source path; this moves it forward, so searches it sooner. You can use the string `$cdir' to refer to the compilation directory (if one is recorded), and `$cwd' to refer to the current working directory. `$cwd' is not the same as `.'---the former tracks the current working directory as it changes during your session, while the latter is immediately expanded to the current directory at the time you add an entry to the source path.

directory

Reset the source path to empty again. This requires confirmation.

show directories

Print the source path: show which directories it contains.

If your source path is cluttered with directories that are no longer of interest, may sometimes cause confusion by finding the wrong versions of source. You can correct the situation as follows:

1. Use directory with no argument to reset the source path to empty.
2. Use directory with suitable arguments to reinstall the directories you want in the source path. You can add all the directories in one command.

Source and machine code

You can use the command info line to map source lines to program addresses (and vice versa), and the command disassemble to display a range of addresses as machine instructions.

info line linespec

Print the starting and ending addresses of the compiled code for source line linespec. You can specify source lines in any of the ways understood by the list command (see section Printing source lines).

For example, we can use info line to discover the location of the object code for the first line of function m4_changequote:

() info line m4_changecom
Line 895 of "builtin.c" starts at pc 0x634c and ends at 0x6350.

We can also inquire (using *addr as the form for linespec) what source line covers a particular address:

() info line *0x63ff
Line 926 of "builtin.c" starts at pc 0x63e4 and ends at 0x6404.

After info line, the default address for the x command is changed to the starting address of the line, so that `x/i' is sufficient to begin examining the machine code (see section Examining memory). Also, this address is saved as the value of the convenience variable $_ (see section Convenience variables).

disassemble

This specialized command dumps a range of memory as machine instructions. The default memory range is the function surrounding the program counter of the selected frame. A single argument to this command is a program counter value; dumps the function surrounding this value. Two arguments specify a range of addresses (first inclusive, second exclusive) to dump.

We can use disassemble to inspect the object code range shown in the last info line example (the example shows SPARC machine instructions):

() disas 0x63e4 0x6404
Dump of assembler code from 0x63e4 to 0x6404:
0x63e4 <builtin_init+5340>:     ble 0x63f8 <builtin_init+5360>
0x63e8 <builtin_init+5344>:     sethi %hi(0x4c00), %o0
0x63ec <builtin_init+5348>:     ld [%i1+4], %o0
0x63f0 <builtin_init+5352>:     b 0x63fc <builtin_init+5364>
0x63f4 <builtin_init+5356>:     ld [%o0+4], %o0
0x63f8 <builtin_init+5360>:     or %o0, 0x1a4, %o0
0x63fc <builtin_init+5364>:     call 0x9288 <path_search>
0x6400 <builtin_init+5368>:     nop
End of assembler dump.

Examining Data

The usual way to examine data in your program is with the print command (abbreviated p), or its synonym inspect. It evaluates and prints the value of an expression of the language your program is written in (see section Using with Different Languages).

print exp

print /f exp

exp is an expression (in the source language). By default the value of exp is printed in a format appropriate to its data type; you can choose a different format by specifying `/f', where f is a letter specifying the format; see section Output formats.

print

print /f

If you omit exp, displays the last value again (from the value history; see section Value history). This allows you to conveniently inspect the same value in an alternative format.

A more low-level way of examining data is with the x command. It examines data in memory at a specified address and prints it in a specified format. See section Examining memory.

If you are interested in information about types, or about how the fields of a struct or class are declared, use the ptype exp command rather than print. See section Examining the Symbol Table.

Expressions

print and many other commands accept an expression and compute its value. Any kind of constant, variable or operator defined by the programming language you are using is valid in an expression in . This includes conditional expressions, function calls, casts and string constants. It unfortunately does not include symbols defined by preprocessor #define commands.

Because C is so widespread, most of the expressions shown in examples in this manual are in C. See section Using with Different Languages, for information on how to use expressions in other languages.

In this section, we discuss operators that you can use in expressions regardless of your programming language.

Casts are supported in all languages, not just in C, because it is so useful to cast a number into a pointer so as to examine a structure at that address in memory.

supports these operators in addition to those of programming languages:

@

`@' is a binary operator for treating parts of memory as arrays. See section Artificial arrays, for more information.

::

`::' allows you to specify a variable in terms of the file or function where it is defined. See section Program variables.

{type} addr

Refers to an object of type type stored at address addr in memory. addr may be any expression whose value is an integer or pointer (but parentheses are required around binary operators, just as in a cast). This construct is allowed regardless of what kind of data is normally supposed to reside at addr.

Program variables

The most common kind of expression to use is the name of a variable in your program.

Variables in expressions are understood in the selected stack frame (see section Selecting a frame); they must either be global (or static) or be visible according to the scope rules of the programming language from the point of execution in that frame. This means that in the function

foo (a)
     int a;
{
  bar (a);
  {
    int b = test ();
    bar (b);
  }
}

you can examine and use the variable a whenever your program is executing within the function foo, but you can only use or examine the variable b while your program is executing inside the block where b is declared.

There is an exception: you can refer to a variable or function whose scope is a single source file even if the current execution point is not in this file. But it is possible to have more than one such variable or function with the same name (in different source files). If that happens, referring to that name has unpredictable effects. If you wish, you can specify a static variable in a particular function or file, using the colon-colon notation:

file::variable
function::variable

Here file or function is the name of the context for the static variable. In the case of file names, you can use quotes to make sure parses the file name as a single word--for example, to print a global value of x defined in `f2.c':

() p 'f2.c'::x

This use of `::' is very rarely in conflict with the very similar use of the same notation in C++. also supports use of the C++ scope resolution operator in expressions.

Warning: Occasionally, a local variable may appear to have the wrong value at certain points in a function--just after entry to a new scope, and just before exit.

Artificial arrays

It is often useful to print out several successive objects of the same type in memory; a section of an array, or an array of dynamically determined size for which only a pointer exists in the program.

You can do this by referring to a contiguous span of memory as an artificial array, using the binary operator `@'. The left operand of `@' should be the first element of the desired array, as an individual object. The right operand should be the desired length of the array. The result is an array value whose elements are all of the type of the left argument. The first element is actually the left argument; the second element comes from bytes of memory immediately following those that hold the first element, and so on. Here is an example. If a program says

int *array = (int *) malloc (len * sizeof (int));

you can print the contents of array with

p *array@len

The left operand of `@' must reside in memory. Array values made with `@' in this way behave just like other arrays in terms of subscripting, and are coerced to pointers when used in expressions. Artificial arrays most often appear in expressions via the value history (see section Value history), after printing one out.

Sometimes the artificial array mechanism is not quite enough; in moderately complex data structures, the elements of interest may not actually be adjacent--for example, if you are interested in the values of pointers in an array. One useful work-around in this situation is to use a convenience variable (see section Convenience variables) as a counter in an expression that prints the first interesting value, and then repeat that expression via RET. For instance, suppose you have an array dtab of pointers to structures, and you are interested in the values of a field fv in each structure. Here is an example of what you might type:

set $i = 0
p dtab[$i++]->fv
RET
RET
...

Output formats

By default, prints a value according to its data type. Sometimes this is not what you want. For example, you might want to print a number in hex, or a pointer in decimal. Or you might want to view data in memory at a certain address as a character string or as an instruction. To do these things, specify an output format when you print a value.

The simplest use of output formats is to say how to print a value already computed. This is done by starting the arguments of the print command with a slash and a format letter. The format letters supported are:

x

Regard the bits of the value as an integer, and print the integer in hexadecimal.

d

Print as integer in signed decimal.

u

Print as integer in unsigned decimal.

o

Print as integer in octal.

t

Print as integer in binary. The letter `t' stands for "two". (1)

a

Print as an address, both absolute in hexadecimal and as an offset from the nearest preceding symbol. You can use this format used to discover where (in what function) an unknown address is located:

() p/a 0x54320
$3 = 0x54320 <_initialize_vx+396>

c

Regard as an integer and print it as a character constant.

f

Regard the bits of the value as a floating point number and print using typical floating point syntax.

For example, to print the program counter in hex (see section Registers), type

p/x $pc

Note that no space is required before the slash; this is because command names in cannot contain a slash.

To reprint the last value in the value history with a different format, you can use the print command with just a format and no expression. For example, `p/x' reprints the last value in hex.

Examining memory

You can use the command x (for "examine") to examine memory in any of several formats, independently of your program's data types.

x/nfu addr

x addr

x

Use the x command to examine memory.

n, f, and u are all optional parameters that specify how much memory to display and how to format it; addr is an expression giving the address where you want to start displaying memory. If you use defaults for nfu, you need not type the slash `/'. Several commands set convenient defaults for addr.

n, the repeat count

The repeat count is a decimal integer; the default is 1. It specifies how much memory (counting by units u) to display.

f, the display format

The display format is one of the formats used by print, or `s' (null-terminated string) or `i' (machine instruction). The default is `x' (hexadecimal) initially, or the format from the last time you used either x or print.

u, the unit size

The unit size is any of

b

Bytes.

h

Halfwords (two bytes).

w

Words (four bytes). This is the initial default.

g

Giant words (eight bytes).

Each time you specify a unit size with x, that size becomes the default unit the next time you use x. (For the `s' and `i' formats, the unit size is ignored and is normally not written.)

addr, starting display address

addr is the address where you want to begin displaying memory. The expression need not have a pointer value (though it may); it is always interpreted as an integer address of a byte of memory. See section Expressions, for more information on expressions. The default for addr is usually just after the last address examined--but several other commands also set the default address: info breakpoints (to the address of the last breakpoint listed), info line (to the starting address of a line), and print (if you use it to display a value from memory).

For example, `x/3uh 0x54320' is a request to display three halfwords (h) of memory, formatted as unsigned decimal integers (`u'), starting at address 0x54320. `x/4xw $sp' prints the four words (`w') of memory above the stack pointer (here, `$sp'; see section Registers) in hexadecimal (`x').

Since the letters indicating unit sizes are all distinct from the letters specifying output formats, you do not have to remember whether unit size or format comes first; either order works. The output specifications `4xw' and `4wx' mean exactly the same thing. (However, the count n must come first; `wx4' does not work.)

Even though the unit size u is ignored for the formats `s' and `i', you might still want to use a count n; for example, `3i' specifies that you want to see three machine instructions, including any operands. The command disassemble gives an alternative way of inspecting machine instructions; see section Source and machine code.

All the defaults for the arguments to x are designed to make it easy to continue scanning memory with minimal specifications each time you use x. For example, after you have inspected three machine instructions with `x/3i addr', you can inspect the next seven with just `x/7'. If you use RET to repeat the x command, the repeat count n is used again; the other arguments default as for successive uses of x.

The addresses and contents printed by the x command are not saved in the value history because there is often too much of them and they would get in the way. Instead, makes these values available for subsequent use in expressions as values of the convenience variables $_ and $__. After an x command, the last address examined is available for use in expressions in the convenience variable $_. The contents of that address, as examined, are available in the convenience variable $__.

If the x command has a repeat count, the address and contents saved are from the last memory unit printed; this is not the same as the last address printed if several units were printed on the last line of output.

Automatic display

If you find that you want to print the value of an expression frequently (to see how it changes), you might want to add it to the automatic display list so that prints its value each time your program stops. Each expression added to the list is given a number to identify it; to remove an expression from the list, you specify that number. The automatic display looks like this:

2: foo = 38
3: bar[5] = (struct hack *) 0x3804

This display shows item numbers, expressions and their current values. As with displays you request manually using x or print, you can specify the output format you prefer; in fact, display decides whether to use print or x depending on how elaborate your format specification is--it uses x if you specify a unit size, or one of the two formats (`i' and `s') that are only supported by x; otherwise it uses print.

display exp

Add the expression exp to the list of expressions to display each time your program stops. See section Expressions. display does not repeat if you press RET again after using it.

display/fmt exp

For fmt specifying only a display format and not a size or count, add the expression exp to the auto-display list but arrange to display it each time in the specified format fmt. See section Output formats.

display/fmt addr

For fmt `i' or `s', or including a unit-size or a number of units, add the expression addr as a memory address to be examined each time your program stops. Examining means in effect doing `x/fmt addr'. See section Examining memory.

For example, `display/i $pc' can be helpful, to see the machine instruction about to be executed each time execution stops (`$pc' is a common name for the program counter; see section Registers).

undisplay dnums...

delete display dnums...

Remove item numbers dnums from the list of expressions to display. undisplay does not repeat if you press RET after using it. (Otherwise you would just get the error `No display number ...'.)

disable display dnums...

Disable the display of item numbers dnums. A disabled display item is not printed automatically, but is not forgotten. It may be enabled again later.

enable display dnums...

Enable display of item numbers dnums. It becomes effective once again in auto display of its expression, until you specify otherwise.

display

Display the current values of the expressions on the list, just as is done when your program stops.

info display

Print the list of expressions previously set up to display automatically, each one with its item number, but without showing the values. This includes disabled expressions, which are marked as such. It also includes expressions which would not be displayed right now because they refer to automatic variables not currently available.

If a display expression refers to local variables, then it does not make sense outside the lexical context for which it was set up. Such an expression is disabled when execution enters a context where one of its variables is not defined. For example, if you give the command display last_char while inside a function with an argument last_char, displays this argument while your program continues to stop inside that function. When it stops elsewhere--where there is no variable last_char---the display is disabled automatically. The next time your program stops where last_char is meaningful, you can enable the display expression once again.

Print settings

provides the following ways to control how arrays, structures, and symbols are printed.

These settings are useful for debugging programs in any language:

set print address

set print address on

prints memory addresses showing the location of stack traces, structure values, pointer values, breakpoints, and so forth, even when it also displays the contents of those addresses. The default is on. For example, this is what a stack frame display looks like, with set print address on:

() f
#0  set_quotes (lq=0x34c78 "<<", rq=0x34c88 ">>")
    at input.c:530
530         if (lquote != def_lquote)

set print address off

Do not print addresses when displaying their contents. For example, this is the same stack frame displayed with set print address off:

() set print addr off
() f
#0  set_quotes (lq="<<", rq=">>") at input.c:530
530         if (lquote != def_lquote)

You can use `set print address off' to eliminate all machine dependent displays from the interface. For example, with print address off, you should get the same text for backtraces on all machines--whether or not they involve pointer arguments.

show print address

Show whether or not addresses are to be printed.

When prints a symbolic address, it normally prints the closest earlier symbol plus an offset. If that symbol does not uniquely identify the address (for example, it is a name whose scope is a single source file), you may need to disambiguate. One way to do this is with info line, for example `info line *0x4537'. Alternately, you can set to print the source file and line number when it prints a symbolic address:

set print symbol-filename on

Tell to print the source file name and line number of a symbol in the symbolic form of an address.

set print symbol-filename off

Do not print source file name and line number of a symbol. This is the default.

show print symbol-filename

Show whether or not will print the source file name and line number of a symbol in the symbolic form of an address.

Another situation where it is helpful to show symbol filenames and line numbers is when disassembling code; shows you the line number and source file that corresponds to each instruction.

Also, you may wish to see the symbolic form only if the address being printed is reasonably close to the closest earlier symbol:

set print max-symbolic-offset max-offset

Tell to only display the symbolic form of an address if the offset between the closest earlier symbol and the address is less than max-offset. The default is 0, which means to always print the symbolic form of an address, if any symbol precedes it.

show print max-symbolic-offset

Ask how large the maximum offset is that prints in a symbolic address.

If you have a pointer and you are not sure where it points, try `set print symbol-filename on'. Then you can determine the name and source file location of the variable where it points, using `p/a pointer'. This interprets the address in symbolic form. For example, here shows that a variable ptt points at another variable t, defined in `hi2.c':

() set print symbol-filename on
() p/a ptt
$4 = 0xe008 <t in hi2.c>

Warning: For pointers that point to a local variable, `p/a' does not show the symbol name and filename of the referent, even with the appropriate set print options turned on.

Other settings control how different kinds of objects are printed:

set print array

set print array on

Pretty-print arrays. This format is more convenient to read, but uses more space. The default is off.

set print array off

Return to compressed format for arrays.

show print array

Show whether compressed or pretty format is selected for displaying arrays.

set print elements number-of-elements

If is printing a large array, it stops printing after it has printed the number of elements set by the set print elements command. This limit also applies to the display of strings. Setting the number of elements to zero means that the printing is unlimited.

show print elements

Display the number of elements of a large array that prints before losing patience.

set print pretty on

Cause to print structures in an indented format with one member per line, like this:

$1 = {
  next = 0x0,
  flags = {
    sweet = 1,
    sour = 1
  },
  meat = 0x54 "Pork"
}

set print pretty off

Cause to print structures in a compact format, like this:

$1 = {next = 0x0, flags = {sweet = 1, sour = 1}, \
meat = 0x54 "Pork"}

This is the default format.

show print pretty

Show which format is using to print structures.

set print sevenbit-strings on

Print using only seven-bit characters; if this option is set, displays any eight-bit characters (in strings or character values) using the notation \nnn. This setting is best if you are working in English (ASCII) and you use the high-order bit of characters as a marker or "meta" bit.

set print sevenbit-strings off

Print full eight-bit characters. This allows the use of more international character sets, and is the default.

show print sevenbit-strings

Show whether or not is printing only seven-bit characters.

set print union on

Tell to print unions which are contained in structures. This is the default setting.

set print union off

Tell not to print unions which are contained in structures.

show print union

Ask whether or not it will print unions which are contained in structures. For example, given the declarations

typedef enum {Tree, Bug} Species;
typedef enum {Big_tree, Acorn, Seedling} Tree_forms;
typedef enum {Caterpillar, Cocoon, Butterfly} 
              Bug_forms;

struct thing {
  Species it;
  union {
    Tree_forms tree;
    Bug_forms bug;
  } form;
};

struct thing foo = {Tree, {Acorn}};

with set print union on in effect `p foo' would print

$1 = {it = Tree, form = {tree = Acorn, bug = Cocoon}}

and with set print union off in effect it would print

$1 = {it = Tree, form = {...}}

These settings are of interest when debugging C++ programs:

set print demangle

set print demangle on

Print C++ names in their source form rather than in the encoded ("mangled") form passed to the assembler and linker for type-safe linkage. The default is `on'.

show print demangle

Show whether C++ names are printed in mangled or demangled form.

set print asm-demangle

set print asm-demangle on

Print C++ names in their source form rather than their mangled form, even in assembler code printouts such as instruction disassemblies. The default is off.

show print asm-demangle

Show whether C++ names in assembly listings are printed in mangled or demangled form.

set demangle-style style

Choose among several encoding schemes used by different compilers to represent C++ names. The choices for style are currently:

auto

Allow to choose a decoding style by inspecting your program.

gnu

Decode based on the GNU C++ compiler (g++) encoding algorithm.

lucid

Decode based on the Lucid C++ compiler (lcc) encoding algorithm.

arm

Decode using the algorithm in the C++ Annotated Reference Manual. Warning: this setting alone is not sufficient to allow debugging cfront-generated executables. would require further enhancement to permit that.

show demangle-style

Display the encoding style currently in use for decoding C++ symbols.

set print object

set print object on

When displaying a pointer to an object, identify the actual (derived) type of the object rather than the declared type, using the virtual function table.

set print object off

Display only the declared type of objects, without reference to the virtual function table. This is the default setting.

show print object

Show whether actual, or declared, object types are displayed.

set print vtbl

set print vtbl on

Pretty print C++ virtual function tables. The default is off.

set print vtbl off

Do not pretty print C++ virtual function tables.

show print vtbl

Show whether C++ virtual function tables are pretty printed, or not.

Value history

Values printed by the print command are saved in the value history so that you can refer to them in other expressions. Values are kept until the symbol table is re-read or discarded (for example with the file or symbol-file commands). When the symbol table changes, the value history is discarded, since the values may contain pointers back to the types defined in the symbol table.

The values printed are given history numbers by which you can refer to them. These are successive integers starting with one. print shows you the history number assigned to a value by printing `$num = ' before the value; here num is the history number.

To refer to any previous value, use `$' followed by the value's history number. The way print labels its output is designed to remind you of this. Just $ refers to the most recent value in the history, and $$ refers to the value before that. $$n refers to the nth value from the end; $$2 is the value just prior to $$, $$1 is equivalent to $$, and $$0 is equivalent to $.

For example, suppose you have just printed a pointer to a structure and want to see the contents of the structure. It suffices to type

p *$

If you have a chain of structures where the component next points to the next one, you can print the contents of the next one with this:

p *$.next

You can print successive links in the chain by repeating this command--which you can do by just typing RET.

Note that the history records values, not expressions. If the value of x is 4 and you type these commands:

print x
set x=5

then the value recorded in the value history by the print command remains 4 even though the value of x has changed.

show values

Print the last ten values in the value history, with their item numbers. This is like `p $$9' repeated ten times, except that show values does not change the history.

show values n

Print ten history values centered on history item number n.

show values +

Print ten history values just after the values last printed. If no more values are available, produces no display.

Pressing RET to repeat show values n has exactly the same effect as `show values +'.

Convenience variables

provides convenience variables that you can use within to hold on to a value and refer to it later. These variables exist entirely within ; they are not part of your program, and setting a convenience variable has no direct effect on further execution of your program. That is why you can use them freely.

Convenience variables are prefixed with `$'. Any name preceded by `$' can be used for a convenience variable, unless it is one of the predefined machine-specific register names (see section Registers). (Value history references, in contrast, are numbers preceded by `$'. See section Value history.)

You can save a value in a convenience variable with an assignment expression, just as you would set a variable in your program. For example:

set $foo = *object_ptr

would save in $foo the value contained in the object pointed to by object_ptr.

Using a convenience variable for the first time creates it, but its value is void until you assign a new value. You can alter the value with another assignment at any time.

Convenience variables have no fixed types. You can assign a convenience variable any type of value, including structures and arrays, even if that variable already has a value of a different type. The convenience variable, when used as an expression, has the type of its current value.

show convenience

Print a list of convenience variables used so far, and their values. Abbreviated show con.

One of the ways to use a convenience variable is as a counter to be incremented or a pointer to be advanced. For example, to print a field from successive elements of an array of structures:

set $i = 0
print bar[$i++]->contents
... repeat that command by typing RET.

Some convenience variables are created automatically by and given values likely to be useful.

$_

The variable $_ is automatically set by the x command to the last address examined (see section Examining memory). Other commands which provide a default address for x to examine also set $_ to that address; these commands include info line and info breakpoint. The type of $_ is void * except when set by the x command, in which case it is a pointer to the type of $__.

$__

The variable $__ is automatically set by the x command to the value found in the last address examined. Its type is chosen to match the format in which the data was printed.

Registers

You can refer to machine register contents, in expressions, as variables with names starting with `$'. The names of registers are different for each machine; use info registers to see the names used on your machine.

info registers

Print the names and values of all registers except floating-point registers (in the selected stack frame).

info all-registers

Print the names and values of all registers, including floating-point registers.

info registers regname ...

Print the relativized value of each specified register regname. regname may be any register name valid on the machine you are using, with or without the initial `$'.

has four "standard" register names that are available (in expressions) on most machines--whenever they do not conflict with an architecture's canonical mnemonics for registers. The register names $pc and $sp are used for the program counter register and the stack pointer. $fp is used for a register that contains a pointer to the current stack frame, and $ps is used for a register that contains the processor status. For example, you could print the program counter in hex with

p/x $pc

or print the instruction to be executed next with

x/i $pc

or add four to the stack pointer(2) with

set $sp += 4

Whenever possible, these four standard register names are available on your machine even though the machine has different canonical mnemonics, so long as there is no conflict. The info registers command shows the canonical names. For example, on the SPARC, info registers displays the processor status register as $psr but you can also refer to it as $ps.

always considers the contents of an ordinary register as an integer when the register is examined in this way. Some machines have special registers which can hold nothing but floating point; these registers are considered to have floating point values. There is no way to refer to the contents of an ordinary register as floating point value (although you can print it as a floating point value with `print/f $regname').

Some registers have distinct "raw" and "virtual" data formats. This means that the data format in which the register contents are saved by the operating system is not the same one that your program normally sees. For example, the registers of the 68881 floating point coprocessor are always saved in "extended" (raw) format, but all C programs expect to work with "double" (virtual) format. In such cases, normally works with the virtual format only (the format that makes sense for your program), but the info registers command prints the data in both formats.

Normally, register values are relative to the selected stack frame (see section Selecting a frame). This means that you get the value that the register would contain if all stack frames farther in were exited and their saved registers restored. In order to see the true contents of hardware registers, you must select the innermost frame (with `frame 0').

However, must deduce where registers are saved, from the machine code generated by your compiler. If some registers are not saved, or if is unable to locate the saved registers, the selected stack frame makes no difference.

Floating point hardware

Depending on the configuration, may be able to give you more information about the status of the floating point hardware.

info float

Display hardware-dependent information about the floating point unit. The exact contents and layout vary depending on the floating point chip; on some platforms, `info float' is not available at all.

Using with Different Languages

Language-specific information is built into for some languages, allowing you to express operations like the above in your program's native language, and allowing to output values in a manner consistent with the syntax of your program's native language. The language you use to build expressions, called the working language, can be selected manually, or can set it automatically.

Switching between source languages

There are two ways to control the working language--either have set it automatically, or select it manually yourself. You can use the set language command for either purpose. On startup, defaults to setting the language automatically.

Setting the working language

If you allow to set the language automatically, expressions are interpreted the same way in your debugging session and your program.

If you wish, you may set the language manually. To do this, issue the command `set language lang', where lang is the name of a language, such as c. For a list of the supported languages, type `set language'.

Having infer the source language

To have set the working language automatically, use `set language local' or `set language auto'. then infers the language that a program was written in by looking at the name of its source files, and examining their extensions:

`*.c'

C source file

`*.C'

`*.cc'

C++ source file

This information is recorded for each function or procedure in a source file. When your program stops in a frame (usually by encountering a breakpoint), sets the working language to the language recorded for the function in that frame. If the language for a frame is unknown (that is, if the function or block corresponding to the frame was defined in a source file that does not have a recognized extension), the current working language is not changed, and issues a warning.

This may not seem necessary for most programs, which are written entirely in one source language. However, program modules and libraries written in one source language can be used by a main program written in a different source language. Using `set language auto' in this case frees you from having to set the working language manually.

Displaying the language

The following commands help you find out which language is the working language, and also what language source files were written in.

show language

Display the current working language. This is the language you can use with commands such as print to build and compute expressions that may involve variables in your program.

info frame

Among the other information listed here (see section Information about a frame) is the source language for this frame. This language becomes the working language if you use an identifier from this frame.

info source

Among the other information listed here (see section Examining the Symbol Table) is the source language of this source file.

Supported languages

4 supports C, and C++. Some features may be used in expressions regardless of the language you use: the @ and :: operators, and the `{type}addr' construct (see section Expressions) can be used with the constructs of any supported language.

The following sections detail to what degree each source language is supported by . These sections are not meant to be language tutorials or references, but serve only as a reference guide to what the expression parser accepts, and what input and output formats should look like for different languages. There are many good books written on each of these languages; please look to these for a language reference or tutorial.

@raisesections

The C++ debugging facilities are jointly implemented by the GNU C++ compiler and . Therefore, to debug your C++ code effectively, you must compile your C++ programs with the GNU C++ compiler, g++.

For best results when debugging C++ programs, use the stabs debugging format. You can select that format explicitly with the g++ command-line options `-gstabs' or `-gstabs+'. See section `Options for Debugging Your Program or GNU CC' in Using GNU CC, for more information.

C and C++ operators

Operators must be defined on values of specific types. For instance, + is defined on numbers, but not on structures. Operators are often defined on groups of types.

For the purposes of C and C++, the following definitions hold:

• Integral types include int with any of its storage-class specifiers; char; and enum.
• Floating-point types include float and double.
• Pointer types include all types defined as (type *).
• Scalar types include all of the above.

The following operators are supported. They are listed here in order of increasing precedence:

,

The comma or sequencing operator. Expressions in a comma-separated list are evaluated from left to right, with the result of the entire expression being the last expression evaluated.

=

Assignment. The value of an assignment expression is the value assigned. Defined on scalar types.

op=

Used in an expression of the form a op= b, and translated to a = a op b. op= and = have the same precendence. op is any one of the operators |, ^, &, <<, >>, +, -, *, /, %.

?:

The ternary operator. a ? b : c can be thought of as: if a then b else c. a should be of an integral type.

||

Logical OR. Defined on integral types.

&&

Logical AND. Defined on integral types.

|

Bitwise OR. Defined on integral types.

^

Bitwise exclusive-OR. Defined on integral types.

&

Bitwise AND. Defined on integral types.

==, !=

Equality and inequality. Defined on scalar types. The value of these expressions is 0 for false and non-zero for true.

<, >, <=, >=

Less than, greater than, less than or equal, greater than or equal. Defined on scalar types. The value of these expressions is 0 for false and non-zero for true.

<<, >>

left shift, and right shift. Defined on integral types.

@

The "artificial array" operator (see section Expressions).

+, -

Addition and subtraction. Defined on integral types, floating-point types and pointer types.

*, /, %

Multiplication, division, and modulus. Multiplication and division are defined on integral and floating-point types. Modulus is defined on integral types.

++, --

Increment and decrement. When appearing before a variable, the operation is performed before the variable is used in an expression; when appearing after it, the variable's value is used before the operation takes place.

*

Pointer dereferencing. Defined on pointer types. Same precedence as ++.

&

Address operator. Defined on variables. Same precedence as ++. For debugging C++, implements a use of `&' beyond what is allowed in the C++ language itself: you can use `&(&ref)' (or, if you prefer, simply `&&ref') to examine the address where a C++ reference variable (declared with `&ref') is stored.

-

Negative. Defined on integral and floating-point types. Same precedence as ++.

!

Logical negation. Defined on integral types. Same precedence as ++.

~

Bitwise complement operator. Defined on integral types. Same precedence as ++.

., ->

Structure member, and pointer-to-structure member. For convenience, regards the two as equivalent, choosing whether to dereference a pointer based on the stored type information. Defined on struct and union data.

[]

Array indexing. a[i] is defined as *(a+i). Same precedence as ->.

()

Function parameter list. Same precedence as ->.

::

C++ scope resolution operator. Defined on struct, union, and class types.

::

Doubled colons also represent the scope operator (see section Expressions). Same precedence as ::, above.

C and C++ constants

allows you to express the constants of C and C++ in the following ways:

• Integer constants are a sequence of digits. Octal constants are specified by a leading `0' (ie. zero), and hexadecimal constants by a leading `0x' or `0X'. Constants may also end with a letter `l', specifying that the constant should be treated as a long value.
• Floating point constants are a sequence of digits, followed by a decimal point, followed by a sequence of digits, and optionally followed by an exponent. An exponent is of the form: `e[[+]|-]nnn', where nnn is another sequence of digits. The `+' is optional for positive exponents.
• Enumerated constants consist of enumerated identifiers, or their integral equivalents.
• Character constants are a single character surrounded by single quotes ('), or a number--the ordinal value of the corresponding character (usually its ASCII value). Within quotes, the single character may be represented by a letter or by escape sequences, which are of the form `\nnn', where nnn is the octal representation of the character's ordinal value; or of the form `\x', where `x' is a predefined special character--for example, `\n' for newline.
• String constants are a sequence of character constants surrounded by double quotes (").
• Pointer constants are an integral value. You can also write pointers to constants using the C operator `&'.
• Array constants are comma-separated lists surrounded by braces `{' and `}'; for example, `{1,2,3}' is a three-element array of integers, `{{1,2}, {3,4}, {5,6}}' is a three-by-two array, and `{&"hi", &"there", &"fred"}' is a three-element array of pointers.

C++ expressions

expression handling has a number of extensions to interpret a significant subset of C++ expressions.

Warning: can only debug C++ code if you compile with the GNU C++ compiler. Moreover, C++ debugging depends on the use of additional debugging information in the symbol table, and thus requires special support. has this support only with the stabs debug format. In particular, if your compiler generates a.out, MIPS ECOFF, RS/6000 XCOFF, or ELF with stabs extensions to the symbol table, these facilities are all available. (With GNU CC, you can use the `-gstabs' option to request stabs debugging extensions explicitly.) Where the object code format is standard COFF or DWARF in ELF, on the other hand, most of the C++ support in does not work.

1. Member function calls are allowed; you can use expressions like

   count = aml->GetOriginal(x, y)
   

2. While a member function is active (in the selected stack frame), your expressions have the same namespace available as the member function; that is, allows implicit references to the class instance pointer this following the same rules as C++.
3. You can call overloaded functions; resolves the function call to the right definition, with one restriction--you must use arguments of the type required by the function that you want to call. does not perform conversions requiring constructors or user-defined type operators.
4. understands variables declared as C++ references; you can use them in expressions just as you do in C++ source--they are automatically dereferenced. In the parameter list shown when displays a frame, the values of reference variables are not displayed (unlike other variables); this avoids clutter, since references are often used for large structures. The address of a reference variable is always shown, unless you have specified `set print address off'.
5. supports the C++ name resolution operator ::---your expressions can use it just as expressions in your program do. Since one scope may be defined in another, you can use :: repeatedly if necessary, for example in an expression like `scope1::scope2::name'. also allows resolving name scope by reference to source files, in both C and C++ debugging (see section Program variables).

C and C++ defaults

If you allow to set type and range checking automatically, they both default to off whenever the working language changes to C or C++. This happens regardless of whether you, or , selected the working language.

If you allow to set the language automatically, it sets the working language to C or C++ on entering code compiled from a source file whose name ends with `.c', `.C', or `.cc'. See section Having infer the source language, for further details.

and C

The set print union and show print union commands apply to the union type. When set to `on', any union that is inside a struct or class is also printed. Otherwise, it appears as `{...}'.

The @ operator aids in the debugging of dynamic arrays, formed with pointers and a memory allocation function. See section Expressions.

features for C++

Some commands are particularly useful with C++, and some are designed specifically for use with C++. Here is a summary:

breakpoint menus

When you want a breakpoint in a function whose name is overloaded, breakpoint menus help you specify which function definition you want. See section Breakpoint menus.

rbreak regex

Setting breakpoints using regular expressions is helpful for setting breakpoints on overloaded functions that are not members of any special classes. See section Setting breakpoints.

catch exceptions

info catch

Debug C++ exception handling using these commands. See section Breakpoints and exceptions.

ptype typename

Print inheritance relationships as well as other information for type typename. See section Examining the Symbol Table.

set print demangle

show print demangle

set print asm-demangle

show print asm-demangle

Control whether C++ symbols display in their source form, both when displaying code as C++ source and when displaying disassemblies. See section Print settings.

set print object

show print object

Choose whether to print derived (actual) or declared types of objects. See section Print settings.

set print vtbl

show print vtbl

Control the format for printing virtual function tables. See section Print settings.

Overloaded symbol names

You can specify a particular definition of an overloaded symbol, using the same notation that is used to declare such symbols in C++: type symbol(types) rather than just symbol. You can also use the command-line word completion facilities to list the available choices, or to finish the type list for you. See section Command completion, for details on how to do this.

Examining the Symbol Table

The commands described in this section allow you to inquire about the symbols (names of variables, functions and types) defined in your program. This information is inherent in the text of your program and does not change as your program executes. finds it in your program's symbol table, in the file indicated when you started (see section Choosing files), or by one of the file-management commands (see section Commands to specify files).

Occasionally, you may need to refer to symbols that contain unusual characters, which ordinarily treats as word delimiters. The most frequent case is in referring to static variables in other source files (see section Program variables). File names are recorded in object files as debugging symbols, but would ordinarily parse a typical file name, like `foo.c', as the three words `foo' `.' `c'. To allow to recognize `foo.c' as a single symbol, enclose it in single quotes; for example,

p 'foo.c'::x

looks up the value of x in the scope of the file `foo.c'.

info address symbol

Describe where the data for symbol is stored. For a register variable, this says which register it is kept in. For a non-register local variable, this prints the stack-frame offset at which the variable is always stored. Note the contrast with `print &symbol', which does not work at all for a register variable, and for a stack local variable prints the exact address of the current instantiation of the variable.

whatis exp

Print the data type of expression exp. exp is not actually evaluated, and any side-effecting operations (such as assignments or function calls) inside it do not take place. See section Expressions.

whatis

Print the data type of $, the last value in the value history.

ptype typename

Print a description of data type typename. typename may be the name of a type, or for C code it may have the form `class class-name', `struct struct-tag', `union union-tag' or `enum enum-tag'.

ptype exp

ptype

Print a description of the type of expression exp. ptype differs from whatis by printing a detailed description, instead of just the name of the type. For example, for this variable declaration:

struct complex {double real; double imag;} v;

the two commands give this output:

() whatis v
type = struct complex
() ptype v
type = struct complex {
    double real;
    double imag;
}

As with whatis, using ptype without an argument refers to the type of $, the last value in the value history.

info types regexp

info types

Print a brief description of all types whose name matches regexp (or all types in your program, if you supply no argument). Each complete typename is matched as though it were a complete line; thus, `i type value' gives information on all types in your program whose name includes the string value, but `i type ^value$' gives information only on types whose complete name is value. This command differs from ptype in two ways: first, like whatis, it does not print a detailed description; second, it lists all source files where a type is defined.

info source

Show the name of the current source file--that is, the source file for the function containing the current point of execution--and the language it was written in.

info sources

Print the names of all source files in your program for which there is debugging information, organized into two lists: files whose symbols have already been read, and files whose symbols will be read when needed.

info functions

Print the names and data types of all defined functions.

info functions regexp

Print the names and data types of all defined functions whose names contain a match for regular expression regexp. Thus, `info fun step' finds all functions whose names include step; `info fun ^step' finds those whose names start with step.

info variables

Print the names and data types of all variables that are declared outside of functions (i.e., excluding local variables).

info variables regexp

Print the names and data types of all variables (except for local variables) whose names contain a match for regular expression regexp.

maint print symbols filename

maint print psymbols filename

maint print msymbols filename

Write a dump of debugging symbol data into the file filename. These commands are used to debug the symbol-reading code. Only symbols with debugging data are included. If you use `maint print symbols', includes all the symbols for which it has already collected full details: that is, filename reflects symbols for only those files whose symbols has read. You can use the command info sources to find out which files these are. If you use `maint print psymbols' instead, the dump shows information about symbols that only knows partially--that is, symbols defined in files that has skimmed, but not yet read completely. Finally, `maint print msymbols' dumps just the minimal symbol information required for each object file from which has read some symbols. See section Commands to specify files, for a discussion of how reads symbols (in the description of symbol-file).

Altering Execution

Once you think you have found an error in your program, you might want to find out for certain whether correcting the apparent error would lead to correct results in the rest of the run. You can find the answer by experiment, using the features for altering execution of the program.

For example, you can store new values into variables or memory locations, give your program a signal, restart it at a different address, or even return prematurely from a function to its caller.

Assignment to variables

To alter the value of a variable, evaluate an assignment expression. See section Expressions. For example,

print x=4

stores the value 4 into the variable x, and then prints the value of the assignment expression (which is 4). See section Using with Different Languages, for more information on operators in supported languages.

If you are not interested in seeing the value of the assignment, use the set command instead of the print command. set is really the same as print except that the expression's value is not printed and is not put in the value history (see section Value history). The expression is evaluated only for its effects.

If the beginning of the argument string of the set command appears identical to a set subcommand, use the set variable command instead of just set. This command is identical to set except for its lack of subcommands. For example, if your program has a variable width, you get an error if you try to set a new value with just `set width=13', because has the command set width:

() whatis width
type = double
() p width
$4 = 13
() set width=47
Invalid syntax in expression.

The invalid expression, of course, is `=47'. In order to actually set the program's variable width, use

() set var width=47

allows more implicit conversions in assignments than C; you can freely store an integer value into a pointer variable or vice versa, and you can convert any structure to any other structure that is the same length or shorter.

To store values into arbitrary places in memory, use the `{...}' construct to generate a value of specified type at a specified address (see section Expressions). For example, {int}0x83040 refers to memory location 0x83040 as an integer (which implies a certain size and representation in memory), and

set {int}0x83040 = 4

stores the value 4 into that memory location.

Continuing at a different address

Ordinarily, when you continue your program, you do so at the place where it stopped, with the continue command. You can instead continue at an address of your own choosing, with the following commands:

jump linespec

Resume execution at line linespec. Execution stops again immediately if there is a breakpoint there. See section Printing source lines, for a description of the different forms of linespec. The jump command does not change the current stack frame, or the stack pointer, or the contents of any memory location or any register other than the program counter. If line linespec is in a different function from the one currently executing, the results may be bizarre if the two functions expect different patterns of arguments or of local variables. For this reason, the jump command requests confirmation if the specified line is not in the function currently executing. However, even bizarre results are predictable if you are well acquainted with the machine-language code of your program.

jump *address

Resume execution at the instruction at address address.

You can get much the same effect as the jump command by storing a new value into the register $pc. The difference is that this does not start your program running; it only changes the address where it will run when you continue. For example,

set $pc = 0x485

makes the next continue command or stepping command execute at address 0x485, rather than at the address where your program stopped. See section Continuing and stepping.

The most common occasion to use the jump command is to back up, perhaps with more breakpoints set, over a portion of a program that has already executed, in order to examine its execution in more detail.

Giving your program a signal

signal signal

Resume execution where your program stopped, but immediately give it the signal signal. signal can be the name or the number of a signal. For example, on many systems signal 2 and signal SIGINT are both ways of sending an interrupt signal. Alternatively, if signal is zero, continue execution without giving a signal. This is useful when your program stopped on account of a signal and would ordinary see the signal when resumed with the continue command; `signal 0' causes it to resume without a signal. signal does not repeat when you press RET a second time after executing the command.

Invoking the signal command is not the same as invoking the kill utility from the shell. Sending a signal with kill causes to decide what to do with the signal depending on the signal handling tables (@xref{Signals}). The signal command passes the signal directly to your program.

Returning from a function

return

return expression

You can cancel execution of a function call with the return command. If you give an expression argument, its value is used as the function's return value.

When you use return, discards the selected stack frame (and all frames within it). You can think of this as making the discarded frame return prematurely. If you wish to specify a value to be returned, give that value as the argument to return.

This pops the selected stack frame (see section Selecting a frame), and any other frames inside of it, leaving its caller as the innermost remaining frame. That frame becomes selected. The specified value is stored in the registers used for returning values of functions.

The return command does not resume execution; it leaves the program stopped in the state that would exist if the function had just returned. In contrast, the finish command (see section Continuing and stepping) resumes execution until the selected stack frame returns naturally.

Calling program functions

call expr

Evaluate the expression expr without displaying void returned values.

You can use this variant of the print command if you want to execute a function from your program, but without cluttering the output with void returned values. The result is printed and saved in the value history, if it is not void.

Patching programs

By default, opens the file containing your program's executable code (or the corefile) read-only. This prevents accidental alterations to machine code; but it also prevents you from intentionally patching your program's binary.

If you'd like to be able to patch the binary, you can specify that explicitly with the set write command. For example, you might want to turn on internal debugging flags, or even to make emergency repairs.

set write on

set write off

If you specify `set write on', opens executable and core files for both reading and writing; if you specify `set write off' (the default), opens them read-only. If you have already loaded a file, you must load it again (using the exec-file or core-file command) after changing set write, for your new setting to take effect.

show write

Display whether executable files and core files are opened for writing as well as reading.

Files

needs to know the file name of the program to be debugged, both in order to read its symbol table and in order to start your program. To debug a core dump of a previous run, you must also tell the name of the core dump file.

Commands to specify files

The usual way to specify executable and core dump file names is with the command arguments given when you start (see section Getting In and Out of.

Occasionally it is necessary to change to a different file during a session. Or you may run and forget to specify a file you want to use. In these situations the commands to specify new files are useful.

file filename

Use filename as the program to be debugged. It is read for its symbols and for the contents of pure memory. It is also the program executed when you use the run command. If you do not specify a directory and the file is not found in the working directory, uses the environment variable PATH as a list of directories to search, just as the shell does when looking for a program to run. You can change the value of this variable, for both and your program, using the path command. On systems with memory-mapped files, an auxiliary file `filename.syms' may hold symbol table information for filename. If so, maps in the symbol table from `filename.syms', starting up more quickly. See the descriptions of the options `-mapped' and `-readnow' (available on the command line, and with the commands file, symbol-file, or add-symbol-file), for more information.

file

file with no argument makes discard any information it has on both executable file and the symbol table.

exec-file [ filename ]

Specify that the program to be run (but not the symbol table) is found in filename. searches the environment variable PATH if necessary to locate your program. Omitting filename means to discard information on the executable file.

symbol-file [ filename ]

Read symbol table information from file filename. PATH is searched when necessary. Use the file command to get both symbol table and program to run from the same file. symbol-file with no argument clears out information on your program's symbol table. The symbol-file command causes to forget the contents of its convenience variables, the value history, and all breakpoints and auto-display expressions. This is because they may contain pointers to the internal data recording symbols and data types, which are part of the old symbol table data being discarded inside . symbol-file does not repeat if you press RET again after executing it once. When is configured for a particular environment, it understands debugging information in whatever format is the standard generated for that environment; you may use either a GNU compiler, or other compilers that adhere to the local conventions. Best results are usually obtained from GNU compilers; for example, using you can generate debugging information for optimized code. On some kinds of object files, the symbol-file command does not normally read the symbol table in full right away. Instead, it scans the symbol table quickly to find which source files and which symbols are present. The details are read later, one source file at a time, as they are needed. The purpose of this two-stage reading strategy is to make start up faster. For the most part, it is invisible except for occasional pauses while the symbol table details for a particular source file are being read. (The set verbose command can turn these pauses into messages if desired. See section Optional warnings and messages.) We have not implemented the two-stage strategy for COFF yet. When the symbol table is stored in COFF format, symbol-file reads the symbol table data in full right away.

symbol-file filename [ -readnow ] [ -mapped ]

file filename [ -readnow ] [ -mapped ]

You can override the two-stage strategy for reading symbol tables by using the `-readnow' option with any of the commands that load symbol table information, if you want to be sure has the entire symbol table available. If memory-mapped files are available on your system through the mmap system call, you can use another option, `-mapped', to cause to write the symbols for your program into a reusable file. Future debugging sessions map in symbol information from this auxiliary symbol file (if the program has not changed), rather than spending time reading the symbol table from the executable program. Using the `-mapped' option has the same effect as starting with the `-mapped' command-line option. You can use both options together, to make sure the auxiliary symbol file has all the symbol information for your program. The auxiliary symbol file for a program called myprog is called `myprog.syms'. Once this file exists (so long as it is newer than the corresponding executable), always attempts to use it when you debug myprog; no special options or commands are needed. The `.syms' file is specific to the host machine where you run . It holds an exact image of the internal symbol table. It cannot be shared across multiple host platforms.

core-file [ filename ]

Specify the whereabouts of a core dump file to be used as the "contents of memory". Traditionally, core files contain only some parts of the address space of the process that generated them; can access the executable file itself for other parts. core-file with no argument specifies that no core file is to be used. Note that the core file is ignored when your program is actually running under . So, if you have been running your program and you wish to debug a core file instead, you must kill the subprocess in which the program is running. To do this, use the kill command (see section Killing the child process).

load filename

The file is loaded at whatever address is specified in the executable. For some object file formats, you can specify the load address when you link the program; for other formats, like a.out, the object file format specifies a fixed address. load does not repeat if you press RET again after using it.

add-symbol-file filename address

add-symbol-file filename address [ -readnow ] [ -mapped ]

The add-symbol-file command reads additional symbol table information from the file filename. You would use this command when filename has been dynamically loaded (by some other means) into the program that is running. address should be the memory address at which the file has been loaded; cannot figure this out for itself. You can specify address as an expression. The symbol table of the file filename is added to the symbol table originally read with the symbol-file command. You can use the add-symbol-file command any number of times; the new symbol data thus read keeps adding to the old. To discard all old symbol data instead, use the symbol-file command. add-symbol-file does not repeat if you press RET after using it. You can use the `-mapped' and `-readnow' options just as with the symbol-file command, to change how manages the symbol table information for filename.

info files

info target

info files and info target are synonymous; both print the current target (see section Specifying a Debugging Target), including the names of the executable and core dump files currently in use by , and the files from which symbols were loaded. The command help target lists all possible targets rather than current ones.

All file-specifying commands allow both absolute and relative file names as arguments. always converts the file name to an absolute file name and remembers it that way.

supports SunOS, SVr4, Irix 5, and IBM RS/6000 shared libraries. automatically loads symbol definitions from shared libraries when you use the run command, or when you examine a core file. (Before you issue the run command, does not understand references to a function in a shared library, however--unless you are debugging a core file).

info share

info sharedlibrary

Print the names of the shared libraries which are currently loaded.

sharedlibrary regex

share regex

This is an obsolescent command; you can use it to explicitly load shared object library symbols for files matching a Unix regular expression, but as with files loaded automatically, it only loads shared libraries required by your program for a core file or after typing run. If regex is omitted all shared libraries required by your program are loaded.

Errors reading symbol files

While reading a symbol file, occasionally encounters problems, such as symbol types it does not recognize, or known bugs in compiler output. By default, does not notify you of such problems, since they are relatively common and primarily of interest to people debugging compilers. If you are interested in seeing information about ill-constructed symbol tables, you can either ask to print only one message about each such type of problem, no matter how many times the problem occurs; or you can ask to print more messages, to see how many times the problems occur, with the set complaints command (see section Optional warnings and messages).

The messages currently printed, and their meanings, include:

inner block not inside outer block in symbol

The symbol information shows where symbol scopes begin and end (such as at the start of a function or a block of statements). This error indicates that an inner scope block is not fully contained in its outer scope blocks. circumvents the problem by treating the inner block as if it had the same scope as the outer block. In the error message, symbol may be shown as "(don't know)" if the outer block is not a function.

block at address out of order

The symbol information for symbol scope blocks should occur in order of increasing addresses. This error indicates that it does not do so. does not circumvent this problem, and has trouble locating symbols in the source file whose symbols it is reading. (You can often determine what source file is affected by specifying set verbose on. See section Optional warnings and messages.)

bad block start address patched

The symbol information for a symbol scope block has a start address smaller than the address of the preceding source line. This is known to occur in the SunOS 4.1.1 (and earlier) C compiler. circumvents the problem by treating the symbol scope block as starting on the previous source line.

bad string table offset in symbol n

Symbol number n contains a pointer into the string table which is larger than the size of the string table. circumvents the problem by considering the symbol to have the name foo, which may cause other problems if many symbols end up with this name.

unknown symbol type 0xnn

The symbol information contains new data types that does not yet know how to read. 0xnn is the symbol type of the misunderstood information, in hexadecimal. circumvents the error by ignoring this symbol information. This usually allows you to debug your program, though certain symbols are not accessible. If you encounter such a problem and feel like debugging it, you can debug with itself, breakpoint on complain, then go up to the function read_dbx_symtab and examine *bufp to see the symbol.

stub type has NULL name

could not find the full definition for a struct or class.

const/volatile indicator missing (ok if using g++ v1.x), got...

The symbol information for a C++ member function is missing some information that recent versions of the compiler should have output for it.

info mismatch between compiler and debugger

could not parse a type specification output by the compiler.

Specifying a Debugging Target

A target is the execution environment occupied by your program. Often, runs in the same host environment as your program; in that case, the debugging target is specified as a side effect when you use the file or core commands. When you need more flexibility--for example, running on a physically separate host, or controlling a standalone system over a serial port or a realtime system over a TCP/IP connection--you can use the target command to specify one of the target types configured for (see section Commands for managing targets).

Active targets

There are three classes of targets: processes, core files, and executable files. can work concurrently on up to three active targets, one in each class. This allows you to (for example) start a process and inspect its activity without abandoning your work on a core file.

For example, if you execute `gdb a.out', then the executable file a.out is the only active target. If you designate a core file as well--presumably from a prior run that crashed and coredumped--then has two active targets and uses them in tandem, looking first in the corefile target, then in the executable file, to satisfy requests for memory addresses. (Typically, these two classes of target are complementary, since core files contain only a program's read-write memory--variables and so on--plus machine status, while executable files contain only the program text and initialized data.)

When you type run, your executable file becomes an active process target as well. When a process target is active, all commands requesting memory addresses refer to that target; addresses in an active core file or executable file target are obscured while the process target is active.

Use the core-file and exec-file commands to select a new core file or executable target (see section Commands to specify files). To specify as a target a process that is already running, use the attach command (see section Debugging an already-running process).

Commands for managing targets

target type parameters

Connects the host environment to a target machine or process. A target is typically a protocol for talking to debugging facilities. You use the argument type to specify the type or protocol of the target machine. Further parameters are interpreted by the target protocol, but typically include things like device names or host names to connect with, process numbers, and baud rates. The target command does not repeat if you press RET again after executing the command.

help target

Displays the names of all targets available. To display targets currently selected, use either info target or info files (see section Commands to specify files).

help target name

Describe a particular target, including any parameters necessary to select it.

Here are some common targets (available, or not, depending on the GDB configuration):

target exec program

An executable file. `target exec program' is the same as `exec-file program'.

target core filename

A core dump file. `target core filename' is the same as `core-file filename'.

Remote debugging

If you are trying to debug a program running on a machine that cannot run GDB in the usual way, it is often useful to use remote debugging. For example, you might use remote debugging on an operating system kernel, or on a small system which does not have a general purpose operating system powerful enough to run a full-featured debugger.

Some configurations of GDB have special serial or TCP/IP interfaces to make this work with particular debugging targets. In addition, GDB comes with a generic serial protocol (specific to GDB, but not specific to any particular target system) which you can use if you write the remote stubs--the code that runs on the remote system to communicate with GDB.

Other remote targets may be available in your configuration of GDB; use help target to list them.

The debugging stub is specific to the architecture of the remote machine; for example, use `sparc-stub.c' to debug programs on SPARC boards.

These working remote stubs are distributed with :

sparc-stub.c

For SPARC architectures.

m68k-stub.c

For Motorola 680x0 architectures.

i386-stub.c

For Intel 386 and compatible architectures.

The `README' file in the distribution may list other recently added stubs.

What the stub can do for you

The debugging stub for your architecture supplies these three subroutines:

set_debug_traps

This routine arranges for handle_exception to run when your program stops. You must call this subroutine explicitly near the beginning of your program.

handle_exception

This is the central workhorse, but your program never calls it explicitly--the setup code arranges for handle_exception to run when a trap is triggered. handle_exception takes control when your program stops during execution (for example, on a breakpoint), and mediates communications with on the host machine. This is where the communications protocol is implemented; handle_exception acts as the representative on the target machine; it begins by sending summary information on the state of your program, then continues to execute, retrieving and transmitting any information needs, until you execute a command that makes your program resume; at that point, handle_exception returns control to your own code on the target machine.

breakpoint

Use this auxiliary subroutine to make your program contain a breakpoint. Depending on the particular situation, this may be the only way for to get control. For instance, if your target machine has some sort of interrupt button, you won't need to call this; pressing the interrupt button transfers control to handle_exception---in effect, to . On some machines, simply receiving characters on the serial port may also trigger a trap; again, in that situation, you don't need to call breakpoint from your own program--simply running `target remote' from the host session gets control. Call breakpoint if none of these is true, or if you simply want to make certain your program stops at a predetermined point for the start of your debugging session.

What you must do for the stub

The debugging stubs that come with are set up for a particular chip architecture, but they have no information about the rest of your debugging target machine.

First of all you need to tell the stub how to communicate with the serial port.

int getDebugChar()

Write this subroutine to read a single character from the serial port. It may be identical to getchar for your target system; a different name is used to allow you to distinguish the two if you wish.

void putDebugChar(int)

Write this subroutine to write a single character to the serial port. It may be identical to putchar for your target system; a different name is used to allow you to distinguish the two if you wish.

If you want to be able to stop your program while it is running, you need to use an interrupt-driven serial driver, and arrange for it to stop when it receives a ^C (`\003', the control-C character). That is the character which uses to tell the remote system to stop.

Getting the debugging target to return the proper status to probably requires changes to the standard stub; one quick and dirty way is to just execute a breakpoint instruction (the "dirty" part is that reports a SIGTRAP instead of a SIGINT).

Other routines you need to supply are:

void exceptionHandler (int exception_number, void *exception_address)

Write this function to install exception_address in the exception handling tables. You need to do this because the stub does not have any way of knowing what the exception handling tables on your target system are like (for example, the processor's table might be in ROM, containing entries which point to a table in RAM). exception_number is the exception number which should be changed; its meaning is architecture-dependent (for example, different numbers might represent divide by zero, misaligned access, etc). When this exception occurs, control should be transferred directly to exception_address, and the processor state (stack, registers, and so on) should be just as it is when a processor exception occurs. So if you want to use a jump instruction to reach exception_address, it should be a simple jump, not a jump to subroutine. For the 386, exception_address should be installed as an interrupt gate so that interrupts are masked while the handler runs. The gate should be at privilege level 0 (the most privileged level). The SPARC and 68k stubs are able to mask interrupts themself without help from exceptionHandler.

void flush_i_cache()

Write this subroutine to flush the instruction cache, if any, on your target machine. If there is no instruction cache, this subroutine may be a no-op. On target machines that have instruction caches, requires this function to make certain that the state of your program is stable.

You must also make sure this library routine is available:

void *memset(void *, int, int)

This is the standard library function memset that sets an area of memory to a known value. If you have one of the free versions of libc.a, memset can be found there; otherwise, you must either obtain it from your hardware manufacturer, or write your own.

If you do not use the GNU C compiler, you may need other standard library subroutines as well; this varies from one stub to another, but in general the stubs are likely to use any of the common library subroutines which gcc generates as inline code.

Putting it all together

In summary, when your program is ready to debug, you must follow these steps.

1. Make sure you have the supporting low-level routines (see section What you must do for the stub):

   getDebugChar, putDebugChar,
   flush_i_cache, memset, exceptionHandler.
   

2. Insert these lines near the top of your program:

   set_debug_traps();
   breakpoint();
   

3. For the 680x0 stub only, you need to provide a variable called exceptionHook. Normally you just use

   void (*exceptionHook)() = 0;
   

   but if before calling set_debug_traps, you set it to point to a function in your program, that function is called when continues after stopping on a trap (for example, bus error). The function indicated by exceptionHook is called with one parameter: an int which is the exception number.
4. Compile and link together: your program, the debugging stub for your target architecture, and the supporting subroutines.
5. Make sure you have a serial connection between your target machine and the host, and identify the serial port used for this on the host.
6. Download your program to your target machine (or get it there by whatever means the manufacturer provides), and start it.
7. To start remote debugging, run on the host machine, and specify as an executable file the program that is running in the remote machine. This tells how to find your program's symbols and the contents of its pure text. Then establish communication using the target remote command. Its argument specifies how to communicate with the target machine--either via a devicename attached to a direct serial line, or a TCP port (usually to a terminal server which in turn has a serial line to the target). For example, to use a serial line connected to the device named `/dev/ttyb':

   target remote /dev/ttyb
   

   To use a TCP connection, use an argument of the form host:port. For example, to connect to port 2828 on a terminal server named manyfarms:

   target remote manyfarms:2828
   

Now you can use all the usual commands to examine and change data and to step and continue the remote program.

To resume the remote program and stop debugging it, use the detach command.

Whenever is waiting for the remote program, if you type the interrupt character (often C-C), attempts to stop the program. This may or may not succeed, depending in part on the hardware and the serial drivers the remote system uses. If you type the interrupt character once again, displays this prompt:

Interrupted while waiting for the program.
Give up (and stop debugging it)?  (y or n)

If you type y, abandons the remote debugging session. (If you decide you want to try again later, you can use `target remote' again to connect once more.) If you type n, goes back to waiting.

Communication protocol

The stub files provided with implement the target side of the communication protocol, and the side is implemented in the source file `remote.c'. Normally, you can simply allow these subroutines to communicate, and ignore the details. (If you're implementing your own stub file, you can still ignore the details: start with one of the existing stub files. `sparc-stub.c' is the best organized, and therefore the easiest to read.)

However, there may be occasions when you need to know something about the protocol--for example, if there is only one serial port to your target machine, you might want your program to do something special if it recognizes a packet meant for .

All commands and responses (other than acknowledgements, which are single characters) are sent as a packet which includes a checksum. A packet is introduced with the character `$', and ends with the character `#' followed by a two-digit checksum:

$packet info#checksum

checksum is computed as the modulo 256 sum of the packet info characters.

When either the host or the target machine receives a packet, the first response expected is an acknowledgement: a single character, either `+' (to indicate the package was received correctly) or `-' (to request retransmission).

The host () sends commands, and the target (the debugging stub incorporated in your program) sends data in response. The target also sends data when your program stops.

Command packets are distinguished by their first character, which identifies the kind of command.

These are the commands currently supported:

g

Requests the values of CPU registers.

G

Sets the values of CPU registers.

maddr,count

Read count bytes at location addr.

Maddr,count:...

Write count bytes at location addr.

c

caddr

Resume execution at the current address (or at addr if supplied).

s

saddr

Step the target program for one instruction, from either the current program counter or from addr if supplied.

k

Kill the target program.

?

Report the most recent signal. To allow you to take advantage of the signal handling commands, one of the functions of the debugging stub is to report CPU traps as the corresponding POSIX signal values.

If you have trouble with the serial connection, you can use the command set remotedebug. This makes report on all packets sent back and forth across the serial line to the remote machine. The packet-debugging information is printed on the standard output stream. set remotedebug off turns it off, and show remotedebug shows you its current state.

Using the E7000 in-circuit emulator

You can use the E7000 in-circuit emulator to develop code for either the Hitachi SH or the H8/300H. Use one of these forms of the `target e7000' command to connect to your E7000:

target e7000 port speed

Use this form if your E7000 is connected to a serial port. The port argument identifies what serial port to use (for example, `com2'). The third argument is the line speed in bits per second (for example, `9600').

target e7000 hostname

If your E7000 is installed as a host on a TCP/IP network, you can just specify its hostname; uses telnet to connect.

Special commands for Hitachi micros

Some commands are available only on the H8/300 or the H8/500 configurations:

set machine h8300

set machine h8300h

Condition for one of the two variants of the H8/300 architecture with `set machine'. You can use `show machine' to check which variant is currently in effect.

set memory mod

show memory

Specify which H8/500 memory model (mod) you are using with `set memory'; check which memory model is in effect with `show memory'. The accepted values for mod are small, big, medium, and compact.

target sim

Debug programs on a simulated CPU

After specifying this target, you can debug programs for the simulated CPU in the same style as programs for your host computer; use the file command to load a new program image, the run command to run your program, and so on.

As well as making available all the usual machine registers (see info reg), this debugging target provides three additional items of information as specially named registers:

cycles

Counts clock-ticks in the simulator.

insts

Counts instructions run in the simulator.

time

Execution time in 60ths of a second.

You can refer to these values in expressions with the usual conventions; for example, `b fputc if $cycles>5000' sets a conditional breakpoint that suspends only after at least 5000 simulated clock ticks.

Controlling

You can alter the way interacts with you by using the set command. For commands controlling how displays data, see section Print settings; other settings are described here.

Prompt

indicates its readiness to read a command by printing a string called the prompt. This string is normally `()'. You can change the prompt string with the set prompt command. For instance, when debugging with , it is useful to change the prompt in one of the sessions so that you can always tell which one you are talking to.

set prompt newprompt

Directs to use newprompt as its prompt string henceforth.

show prompt

Prints a line of the form: `Gdb's prompt is: your-prompt'

Command editing

reads its input commands via the readline interface. This GNU library provides consistent behavior for programs which provide a command line interface to the user. Advantages are emacs-style or vi-style inline editing of commands, csh-like history substitution, and a storage and recall of command history across debugging sessions.

You may control the behavior of command line editing in with the command set.

set editing

set editing on

Enable command line editing (enabled by default).

set editing off

Disable command line editing.

show editing

Show whether command line editing is enabled.

Command history

can keep track of the commands you type during your debugging sessions, so that you can be certain of precisely what happened. Use these commands to manage the command history facility.

set history filename fname

Set the name of the command history file to fname. This is the file where reads an initial command history list, and where it writes the command history from this session when it exits. You can access this list through history expansion or through the history command editing characters listed below. This file defaults to the value of the environment variable GDBHISTFILE, or to `./.gdb_history' if this variable is not set.

set history save

set history save on

Record command history in a file, whose name may be specified with the set history filename command. By default, this option is disabled.

set history save off

Stop recording command history in a file.

set history size size

Set the number of commands which keeps in its history list. This defaults to the value of the environment variable HISTSIZE, or to 256 if this variable is not set.

History expansion assigns special meaning to the character !.

Since ! is also the logical not operator in C, history expansion is off by default. If you decide to enable history expansion with the set history expansion on command, you may sometimes need to follow ! (when it is used as logical not, in an expression) with a space or a tab to prevent it from being expanded. The readline history facilities do not attempt substitution on the strings != and !(, even when history expansion is enabled.

The commands to control history expansion are:

set history expansion on

set history expansion

Enable history expansion. History expansion is off by default.

set history expansion off

Disable history expansion. The readline code comes with more complete documentation of editing and history expansion features. Users unfamiliar with emacs or vi may wish to read it.

show history

show history filename

show history save

show history size

show history expansion

These commands display the state of the history parameters. show history by itself displays all four states.

show commands

Display the last ten commands in the command history.

show commands n

Print ten commands centered on command number n.

show commands +

Print ten commands just after the commands last printed.

Screen size

Certain commands to may produce large amounts of information output to the screen. To help you read all of it, pauses and asks you for input at the end of each page of output. Type RET when you want to continue the output, or q to discard the remaining output. Also, the screen width setting determines when to wrap lines of output. Depending on what is being printed, tries to break the line at a readable place, rather than simply letting it overflow onto the following line.

Normally knows the size of the screen from the termcap data base together with the value of the TERM environment variable and the stty rows and stty cols settings. If this is not correct, you can override it with the set height and set width commands:

set height lpp

show height

set width cpl

show width

These set commands specify a screen height of lpp lines and a screen width of cpl characters. The associated show commands display the current settings. If you specify a height of zero lines, does not pause during output no matter how long the output is. This is useful if output is to a file or to an editor buffer. Likewise, you can specify `set width 0' to prevent from wrapping its output.

Numbers

You can always enter numbers in octal, decimal, or hexadecimal in by the usual conventions: octal numbers begin with `0', decimal numbers end with `.', and hexadecimal numbers begin with `0x'. Numbers that begin with none of these are, by default, entered in base 10; likewise, the default display for numbers--when no particular format is specified--is base 10. You can change the default base for both input and output with the set radix command.

set radix base

Set the default base for numeric input and display. Supported choices for base are decimal 8, 10, or 16. base must itself be specified either unambiguously or using the current default radix; for example, any of

set radix 012
set radix 10.
set radix 0xa

sets the base to decimal. On the other hand, `set radix 10' leaves the radix unchanged no matter what it was.

show radix

Display the current default base for numeric input and display.

Optional warnings and messages

By default, is silent about its inner workings. If you are running on a slow machine, you may want to use the set verbose command. It makes tell you when it does a lengthy internal operation, so you will not think it has crashed.

Currently, the messages controlled by set verbose are those which announce that the symbol table for a source file is being read; see symbol-file in section Commands to specify files.

set verbose on

Enables output of certain informational messages.

set verbose off

Disables output of certain informational messages.

show verbose

Displays whether set verbose is on or off.

By default, if encounters bugs in the symbol table of an object file, it is silent; but if you are debugging a compiler, you may find this information useful (see section Errors reading symbol files).

set complaints limit

Permits to output limit complaints about each type of unusual symbols before becoming silent about the problem. Set limit to zero to suppress all complaints; set it to a large number to prevent complaints from being suppressed.

show complaints

Displays how many symbol complaints is permitted to produce.

By default, is cautious, and asks what sometimes seems to be a lot of stupid questions to confirm certain commands. For example, if you try to run a program which is already running:

() run
The program being debugged has been started already.
Start it from the beginning? (y or n)

If you are willing to unflinchingly face the consequences of your own commands, you can disable this "feature":

set confirm off

Disables confirmation requests.

set confirm on

Enables confirmation requests (the default).

show confirm

Displays state of confirmation requests.

Some systems allow individual object files that make up your program to be replaced without stopping and restarting your program. If you are running on one of these systems, you can allow to reload the symbols for automatically relinked modules:

set symbol-reloading on

Replace symbol definitions for the corresponding source file when an object file with a particular name is seen again.

set symbol-reloading off

Do not replace symbol definitions when re-encountering object files of the same name. This is the default state; if you are not running on a system that permits automatically relinking modules, you should leave symbol-reloading off, since otherwise may discard symbols when linking large programs, that may contain several modules (from different directories or libraries) with the same name.

show symbol-reloading

Show the current on or off setting.

Canned Sequences of Commands

Aside from breakpoint commands (see section Breakpoint command lists), provides two ways to store sequences of commands for execution as a unit: user-defined commands and command files.

User-defined commands

A user-defined command is a sequence of commands to which you assign a new name as a command. This is done with the define command.

define commandname

Define a command named commandname. If there is already a command by that name, you are asked to confirm that you want to redefine it. The definition of the command is made up of other command lines, which are given following the define command. The end of these commands is marked by a line containing end.

document commandname

Give documentation to the user-defined command commandname. The command commandname must already be defined. This command reads lines of documentation just as define reads the lines of the command definition, ending with end. After the document command is finished, help on command commandname displays the documentation you have specified. You may use the document command again to change the documentation of a command. Redefining the command with define does not change the documentation.

help user-defined

List all user-defined commands, with the first line of the documentation (if any) for each.

show user

show user commandname

Display the commands used to define commandname (but not its documentation). If no commandname is given, display the definitions for all user-defined commands.

User-defined commands do not take arguments. When they are executed, the commands of the definition are not printed. An error in any command stops execution of the user-defined command.

Commands that would ask for confirmation if used interactively proceed without asking when used inside a user-defined command. Many commands that normally print messages to say what they are doing omit the messages when used in a user-defined command.

User-defined command hooks

You may define hooks, which are a special kind of user-defined command. Whenever you run the command `foo', if the user-defined command `hook-foo' exists, it is executed (with no arguments) before that command.

In addition, a pseudo-command, `stop' exists. Defining (`hook-stop') makes the associated commands execute every time execution stops in your program: before breakpoint commands are run, displays are printed, or the stack frame is printed.

For example, to ignore SIGALRM signals while single-stepping, but treat them normally during normal execution, you could define:

define hook-stop
handle SIGALRM nopass
end

define hook-run
handle SIGALRM pass
end

define hook-continue
handle SIGLARM pass
end

You can define a hook for any single-word command in , but not for command aliases; you should define a hook for the basic command name, e.g. backtrace rather than bt. If an error occurs during the execution of your hook, execution of commands stops and issues a prompt (before the command that you actually typed had a chance to run).

If you try to define a hook which does not match any known command, you get a warning from the define command.

Command files

A command file for is a file of lines that are commands. Comments (lines starting with #) may also be included. An empty line in a command file does nothing; it does not mean to repeat the last command, as it would from the terminal.

When you start , it automatically executes commands from its init files. These are files named `'. reads the init file (if any) in your home directory, then processes command line options and operands, and then reads the init file (if any) in the current working directory. This is so the init file in your home directory can set options (such as set complaints) which affect the processing of the command line options and operands. The init files are not executed if you use the `-nx' option; see section Choosing modes.

You can also request the execution of a command file with the source command:

source filename

Execute the command file filename.

The lines in a command file are executed sequentially. They are not printed as they are executed. An error in any command terminates execution of the command file.

Commands that would ask for confirmation if used interactively proceed without asking when used in a command file. Many commands that normally print messages to say what they are doing omit the messages when called from command files.

Commands for controlled output

During the execution of a command file or a user-defined command, normal output is suppressed; the only output that appears is what is explicitly printed by the commands in the definition. This section describes three commands useful for generating exactly the output you want.

echo text

Print text. Nonprinting characters can be included in text using C escape sequences, such as `\n' to print a newline. No newline is printed unless you specify one. In addition to the standard C escape sequences, a backslash followed by a space stands for a space. This is useful for displaying a string with spaces at the beginning or the end, since leading and trailing spaces are otherwise trimmed from all arguments. To print ` and foo = ', use the command `echo \ and foo = \ '. A backslash at the end of text can be used, as in C, to continue the command onto subsequent lines. For example,

echo This is some text\n\
which is continued\n\
onto several lines.\n

produces the same output as

echo This is some text\n
echo which is continued\n
echo onto several lines.\n

output expression

Print the value of expression and nothing but that value: no newlines, no `$nn = '. The value is not entered in the value history either. See section Expressions, for more information on expressions.

output/fmt expression

Print the value of expression in format fmt. You can use the same formats as for print. See section Output formats, for more information.

printf string, expressions...

Print the values of the expressions under the control of string. The expressions are separated by commas and may be either numbers or pointers. Their values are printed as specified by string, exactly as if your program were to execute the C subroutine

printf (string, expressions...);

For example, you can print two values in hex like this:

printf "foo, bar-foo = 0x%x, 0x%x\n", foo, bar-foo

The only backslash-escape sequences that you can use in the format string are the simple ones that consist of backslash followed by a letter.

Using under GNU Emacs

A special interface allows you to use GNU Emacs to view (and edit) the source files for the program you are debugging with .

To use this interface, use the command M-x gdb in Emacs. Give the executable file you want to debug as an argument. This command starts as a subprocess of Emacs, with input and output through a newly created Emacs buffer.

Using under Emacs is just like using normally except for two things:

• All "terminal" input and output goes through the Emacs buffer.

This applies both to commands and their output, and to the input and output done by the program you are debugging.

This is useful because it means that you can copy the text of previous commands and input them again; you can even use parts of the output in this way.

All the facilities of Emacs' Shell mode are available for interacting with your program. In particular, you can send signals the usual way--for example, C-c C-c for an interrupt, C-c C-z for a stop.

• displays source code through Emacs.

Each time displays a stack frame, Emacs automatically finds the source file for that frame and puts an arrow (`=>') at the left margin of the current line. Emacs uses a separate buffer for source display, and splits the screen to show both your session and the source.

Explicit list or search commands still produce output as usual, but you probably have no reason to use them from Emacs.

Warning: If the directory where your program resides is not your current directory, it can be easy to confuse Emacs about the location of the source files, in which case the auxiliary display buffer does not appear to show your source. can find programs by searching your environment's PATH variable, so the input and output session proceeds normally; but Emacs does not get enough information back from to locate the source files in this situation. To avoid this problem, either start mode from the directory where your program resides, or specify an absolute file name when prompted for the M-x gdb argument.

A similar confusion can result if you use the file command to switch to debugging a program in some other location, from an existing buffer in Emacs.

By default, M-x gdb calls the program called `gdb'. If you need to call by a different name (for example, if you keep several configurations around, with different names) you can set the Emacs variable gdb-command-name; for example,

(setq gdb-command-name "mygdb")

(preceded by ESC ESC, or typed in the *scratch* buffer, or in your `.emacs' file) makes Emacs call the program named "mygdb" instead.

In the I/O buffer, you can use these special Emacs commands in addition to the standard Shell mode commands:

C-h m

Describe the features of Emacs' Mode.

M-s

Execute to another source line, like the step command; also update the display window to show the current file and location.

M-n

Execute to next source line in this function, skipping all function calls, like the next command. Then update the display window to show the current file and location.

M-i

Execute one instruction, like the stepi command; update display window accordingly.

M-x gdb-nexti

Execute to next instruction, using the nexti command; update display window accordingly.

C-c C-f

Execute until exit from the selected stack frame, like the finish command.

M-c

Continue execution of your program, like the continue command. Warning: In Emacs v19, this command is C-c C-p.

M-u

Go up the number of frames indicated by the numeric argument (see section `Numeric Arguments' in The GNU Emacs Manual), like the up command. Warning: In Emacs v19, this command is C-c C-u.

M-d

Go down the number of frames indicated by the numeric argument, like the down command. Warning: In Emacs v19, this command is C-c C-d.

C-x &

Read the number where the cursor is positioned, and insert it at the end of the I/O buffer. For example, if you wish to disassemble code around an address that was displayed earlier, type disassemble; then move the cursor to the address display, and pick up the argument for disassemble by typing C-x &. You can customize this further by defining elements of the list gdb-print-command; once it is defined, you can format or otherwise process numbers picked up by C-x & before they are inserted. A numeric argument to C-x & indicates that you wish special formatting, and also acts as an index to pick an element of the list. If the list element is a string, the number to be inserted is formatted using the Emacs function format; otherwise the number is passed as an argument to the corresponding list element.

In any source file, the Emacs command C-x SPC (gdb-break) tells to set a breakpoint on the source line point is on.

If you accidentally delete the source-display buffer, an easy way to get it back is to type the command f in the buffer, to request a frame display; when you run under Emacs, this recreates the source buffer if necessary to show you the context of the current frame.

The source files displayed in Emacs are in ordinary Emacs buffers which are visiting the source files in the usual way. You can edit the files with these buffers if you wish; but keep in mind that communicates with Emacs in terms of line numbers. If you add or delete lines from the text, the line numbers that knows cease to correspond properly with the code.

Reporting Bugs in

Your bug reports play an essential role in making reliable.

Reporting a bug may help you by bringing a solution to your problem, or it may not. But in any case the principal function of a bug report is to help the entire community by making the next version of work better. Bug reports are your contribution to the maintenance of .

In order for a bug report to serve its purpose, you must include the information that enables us to fix the bug.

Have you found a bug?

If you are not sure whether you have found a bug, here are some guidelines:

• If the debugger gets a fatal signal, for any input whatever, that is a bug. Reliable debuggers never crash.
• If produces an error message for valid input, that is a bug.
• If does not produce an error message for invalid input, that is a bug. However, you should note that your idea of "invalid input" might be our idea of "an extension" or "support for traditional practice".
• If you are an experienced user of debugging tools, your suggestions for improvement of are welcome in any case.

How to report bugs

A number of companies and individuals offer support for GNU products. If you obtained from a support organization, we recommend you contact that organization first.

You can find contact information for many support companies and individuals in the file `etc/SERVICE' in the GNU Emacs distribution.

In any event, we also recommend that you send bug reports for to one of these addresses:

bug-gdb@prep.ai.mit.edu
{ucbvax|mit-eddie|uunet}!prep.ai.mit.edu!bug-gdb

Do not send bug reports to `info-gdb', or to `help-gdb', or to any newsgroups. Most users of do not want to receive bug reports. Those that do, have arranged to receive `bug-gdb'.

The mailing list `bug-gdb' has a newsgroup `gnu.gdb.bug' which serves as a repeater. The mailing list and the newsgroup carry exactly the same messages. Often people think of posting bug reports to the newsgroup instead of mailing them. This appears to work, but it has one problem which can be crucial: a newsgroup posting often lacks a mail path back to the sender. Thus, if we need to ask for more information, we may be unable to reach you. For this reason, it is better to send bug reports to the mailing list.

As a last resort, send bug reports on paper to:

GNU Debugger Bugs
Free Software Foundation
545 Tech Square
Cambridge, MA 02139

The fundamental principle of reporting bugs usefully is this: report all the facts. If you are not sure whether to state a fact or leave it out, state it!

Often people omit facts because they think they know what causes the problem and assume that some details do not matter. Thus, you might assume that the name of the variable you use in an example does not matter. Well, probably it does not, but one cannot be sure. Perhaps the bug is a stray memory reference which happens to fetch from the location where that name is stored in memory; perhaps, if the name were different, the contents of that location would fool the debugger into doing the right thing despite the bug. Play it safe and give a specific, complete example. That is the easiest thing for you to do, and the most helpful.

Keep in mind that the purpose of a bug report is to enable us to fix the bug if it is new to us. It is not as important as what happens if the bug is already known. Therefore, always write your bug reports on the assumption that the bug has not been reported previously.

Sometimes people give a few sketchy facts and ask, "Does this ring a bell?" Those bug reports are useless, and we urge everyone to refuse to respond to them except to chide the sender to report bugs properly.

To enable us to fix the bug, you should include all these things:

• The version of . announces it if you start with no arguments; you can also print it at any time using show version. Without this, we will not know whether there is any point in looking for the bug in the current version of .
• The type of machine you are using, and the operating system name and version number.
• What compiler (and its version) was used to compile ---e.g. "--2.0".
• What compiler (and its version) was used to compile the program you are debugging--e.g. "--2.0".
• The command arguments you gave the compiler to compile your example and observe the bug. For example, did you use `-O'? To guarantee you will not omit something important, list them all. A copy of the Makefile (or the output from make) is sufficient. If we were to try to guess the arguments, we would probably guess wrong and then we might not encounter the bug.
• A complete input script, and all necessary source files, that will reproduce the bug.
• A description of what behavior you observe that you believe is incorrect. For example, "It gets a fatal signal." Of course, if the bug is that gets a fatal signal, then we will certainly notice it. But if the bug is incorrect output, we might not notice unless it is glaringly wrong. We are human, after all. You might as well not give us a chance to make a mistake. Even if the problem you experience is a fatal signal, you should still say so explicitly. Suppose something strange is going on, such as, your copy of is out of synch, or you have encountered a bug in the C library on your system. (This has happened!) Your copy might crash and ours would not. If you told us to expect a crash, then when ours fails to crash, we would know that the bug was not happening for us. If you had not told us to expect a crash, then we would not be able to draw any conclusion from our observations.
• If you wish to suggest changes to the source, send us context diffs. If you even discuss something in the source, refer to it by context, not by line number. The line numbers in our development sources will not match those in your sources. Your line numbers would convey no useful information to us.

Here are some things that are not necessary:

• A description of the envelope of the bug. Often people who encounter a bug spend a lot of time investigating which changes to the input file will make the bug go away and which changes will not affect it. This is often time consuming and not very useful, because the way we will find the bug is by running a single example under the debugger with breakpoints, not by pure deduction from a series of examples. We recommend that you save your time for something else. Of course, if you can find a simpler example to report instead of the original one, that is a convenience for us. Errors in the output will be easier to spot, running under the debugger will take less time, and so on. However, simplification is not vital; if you do not want to do this, report the bug anyway and send us the entire test case you used.
• A patch for the bug. A patch for the bug does help us if it is a good one. But do not omit the necessary information, such as the test case, on the assumption that a patch is all we need. We might see problems with your patch and decide to fix the problem another way, or we might not understand it at all. Sometimes with a program as complicated as it is very hard to construct an example that will make the program follow a certain path through the code. If you do not send us the example, we will not be able to construct one, so we will not be able to verify that the bug is fixed. And if we cannot understand what bug you are trying to fix, or why your patch should be an improvement, we will not install it. A test case will help us to understand.
• A guess about what the bug is or what it depends on. Such guesses are usually wrong. Even we cannot guess right about such things without first using the debugger to find the facts.

Formatting Documentation

The GDB 4 release includes an already-formatted reference card, ready for printing with PostScript or Ghostscript, in the `gdb' subdirectory of the main source directory(3). If you can use PostScript or Ghostscript with your printer, you can print the reference card immediately with `refcard.ps'.

The release also includes the source for the reference card. You can format it, using TeX, by typing:

make refcard.dvi

The GDB reference card is designed to print in landscape mode on US "letter" size paper; that is, on a sheet 11 inches wide by 8.5 inches high. You will need to specify this form of printing as an option to your DVI output program.

All the documentation for GDB comes as part of the machine-readable distribution. The documentation is written in Texinfo format, which is a documentation system that uses a single source file to produce both on-line information and a printed manual. You can use one of the Info formatting commands to create the on-line version of the documentation and TeX (or texi2roff) to typeset the printed version.

GDB includes an already formatted copy of the on-line Info version of this manual in the `gdb' subdirectory. The main Info file is `gdb-version-number/gdb/gdb.info', and it refers to subordinate files matching `gdb.info*' in the same directory. If necessary, you can print out these files, or read them with any editor; but they are easier to read using the info subsystem in GNU Emacs or the standalone info program, available as part of the GNU Texinfo distribution.

If you want to format these Info files yourself, you need one of the Info formatting programs, such as texinfo-format-buffer or makeinfo.

If you have makeinfo installed, and are in the top level GDB source directory (`gdb-', in the case of version ), you can make the Info file by typing:

cd gdb
make gdb.info

If you want to typeset and print copies of this manual, you need TeX, a program to print its DVI output files, and `texinfo.tex', the Texinfo definitions file.

TeX is a typesetting program; it does not print files directly, but produces output files called DVI files. To print a typeset document, you need a program to print DVI files. If your system has TeX installed, chances are it has such a program. The precise command to use depends on your system; lpr -d is common; another (for PostScript devices) is dvips. The DVI print command may require a file name without any extension or a `.dvi' extension.

TeX also requires a macro definitions file called `texinfo.tex'. This file tells TeX how to typeset a document written in Texinfo format. On its own, TeX cannot read, much less typeset a Texinfo file. `texinfo.tex' is distributed with GDB and is located in the `gdb-version-number/texinfo' directory.

If you have TeX and a DVI printer program installed, you can typeset and print this manual. First switch to the the `gdb' subdirectory of the main source directory (for example, to `gdb-/gdb') and then type:

make gdb.dvi

Installing GDB

GDB comes with a configure script that automates the process of preparing GDB for installation; you can then use make to build the gdb program. (4)

The GDB distribution includes all the source code you need for GDB in a single directory, whose name is usually composed by appending the version number to `gdb'.

For example, the GDB version distribution is in the `gdb-' directory. That directory contains:

gdb-/configure (and supporting files)

script for configuring GDB and all its supporting libraries.

gdb-/gdb

the source specific to GDB itself

gdb-/bfd

source for the Binary File Descriptor library

gdb-/include

GNU include files

gdb-/libiberty

source for the `-liberty' free software library

gdb-/opcodes

source for the library of opcode tables and disassemblers

gdb-/readline

source for the GNU command-line interface

gdb-/glob

source for the GNU filename pattern-matching subroutine

gdb-/mmalloc

source for the GNU memory-mapped malloc package

The simplest way to configure and build GDB is to run configure from the `gdb-version-number' source directory, which in this example is the `gdb-' directory.

First switch to the `gdb-version-number' source directory if you are not already in it; then run configure. Pass the identifier for the platform on which GDB will run as an argument.

For example:

cd gdb-
./configure host
make

where host is an identifier such as `sun4' or `decstation', that identifies the platform where GDB will run. (You can often leave off host; configure tries to guess the correct value by examining your system.)

Running `configure host' and then running make builds the `bfd', `readline', `mmalloc', and `libiberty' libraries, then gdb itself. The configured source files, and the binaries, are left in the corresponding source directories.

configure is a Bourne-shell (/bin/sh) script; if your system does not recognize this automatically when you run a different shell, you may need to run sh on it explicitly:

sh configure host

If you run configure from a directory that contains source directories for multiple libraries or programs, such as the `gdb-' source directory for version , configure creates configuration files for every directory level underneath (unless you tell it not to, with the `--norecursion' option).

You can run the configure script from any of the subordinate directories in the GDB distribution if you only want to configure that subdirectory, but be sure to specify a path to it.

For example, with version , type the following to configure only the bfd subdirectory:

cd gdb-/bfd
../configure host

You can install anywhere; it has no hardwired paths. However, you should make sure that the shell on your path (named by the `SHELL' environment variable) is publicly readable. Remember that GDB uses the shell to start your program--some systems refuse to let GDB debug child processes whose programs are not readable.

Compiling GDB in another directory

If you want to run GDB versions for several host or target machines, you need a different gdb compiled for each combination of host and target. configure is designed to make this easy by allowing you to generate each configuration in a separate subdirectory, rather than in the source directory. If your make program handles the `VPATH' feature (GNU make does), running make in each of these directories builds the gdb program specified there.

To build gdb in a separate directory, run configure with the `--srcdir' option to specify where to find the source. (You also need to specify a path to find configure itself from your working directory. If the path to configure would be the same as the argument to `--srcdir', you can leave out the `--srcdir' option; it is assumed.)

For example, with version , you can build GDB in a separate directory for a Sun 4 like this:

cd gdb-
mkdir ../gdb-sun4
cd ../gdb-sun4
../gdb-/configure sun4
make

When configure builds a configuration using a remote source directory, it creates a tree for the binaries with the same structure (and using the same names) as the tree under the source directory. In the example, you'd find the Sun 4 library `libiberty.a' in the directory `gdb-sun4/libiberty', and GDB itself in `gdb-sun4/gdb'.

One popular reason to build several GDB configurations in separate directories is to configure GDB for cross-compiling (where GDB runs on one machine--the host--while debugging programs that run on another machine--the target). You specify a cross-debugging target by giving the `--target=target' option to configure.

When you run make to build a program or library, you must run it in a configured directory--whatever directory you were in when you called configure (or one of its subdirectories).

The Makefile that configure generates in each source directory also runs recursively. If you type make in a source directory such as `gdb-' (or in a separate configured directory configured with `--srcdir=dirname/gdb-'), you will build all the required libraries, and then build GDB.

When you have multiple hosts or targets configured in separate directories, you can run make on them in parallel (for example, if they are NFS-mounted on each of the hosts); they will not interfere with each other.

Specifying names for hosts and targets

The specifications used for hosts and targets in the configure script are based on a three-part naming scheme, but some short predefined aliases are also supported. The full naming scheme encodes three pieces of information in the following pattern:

architecture-vendor-os

For example, you can use the alias sun4 as a host argument, or as the value for target in a --target=target option. The equivalent full name is `sparc-sun-sunos4'.

The configure script accompanying GDB does not provide any query facility to list all supported host and target names or aliases. configure calls the Bourne shell script config.sub to map abbreviations to full names; you can read the script, if you wish, or you can use it to test your guesses on abbreviations--for example:

% sh config.sub sun4
sparc-sun-sunos4.1.1
% sh config.sub sun3
m68k-sun-sunos4.1.1
% sh config.sub decstation
mips-dec-ultrix4.2
% sh config.sub hp300bsd
m68k-hp-bsd
% sh config.sub i386v
i386-unknown-sysv
% sh config.sub i786v
Invalid configuration `i786v': machine `i786v' not recognized

config.sub is also distributed in the GDB source directory (`gdb-', for version ).

configure options

Here is a summary of the configure options and arguments that are most often useful for building . configure also has several other options not listed here. See Info file `configure.info', node `What Configure Does', for a full explanation of configure.

configure [--help]
          [--prefix=dir]
          [--srcdir=dirname]
          [--norecursion] [--rm]
          [--target=target] host

You may introduce options with a single `-' rather than `--' if you prefer; but you may abbreviate option names if you use `--'.

--help

Display a quick summary of how to invoke configure.

-prefix=dir

Configure the source to install programs and files under directory `dir'.

--srcdir=dirname

Warning: using this option requires GNU make, or another make that implements the VPATH feature.
Use this option to make configurations in directories separate from the GDB source directories. Among other things, you can use this to build (or maintain) several configurations simultaneously, in separate directories. configure writes configuration specific files in the current directory, but arranges for them to use the source in the directory dirname. configure creates directories under the working directory in parallel to the source directories below dirname.

--norecursion

Configure only the directory level where configure is executed; do not propagate configuration to subdirectories.

--rm

Remove files otherwise built during configuration.

--target=target

Configure GDB for cross-debugging programs running on the specified target. Without this option, GDB is configured to debug programs that run on the same machine (host) as GDB itself. There is no convenient way to generate a list of all available targets.

host ...

Configure GDB to run on the specified host. There is no convenient way to generate a list of all available hosts.

configure accepts other options, for compatibility with configuring other GNU tools recursively; but these are the only options that affect GDB or its supporting libraries.

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