Re: Interfacing gdb

[Charles Manning]

On Saturday 21 February 2009 06:06:56 Sam Steingold wrote:
> Charles Manning wrote:
> > On Saturday 14 February 2009 06:04:21 Maciej Piechotka wrote:
> >> Is it possible to write a plugin to gdb (i.e. program which may examin
> >> data provided by gdb - possibly from gdb)? Preferably in some sort of
> >> scripting language.
> >
> > You don't really need a plug in.
> >
> > gdb has a a very flexible built-in  macro language that allows you to
> > write a lot of very useful scripts that can do all sorts of things.
>
> "flexible"?!
> gdb is a great debugger, but to say that the macro system is lacking is to
> make a gross understatement.
>
> e.g., http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gdb.general/445:
>
> the following:
>
> define break_foo_bar
>    break foo
>    commands
>      print x
>    end
>    break bar
>    commands
>      print y
>    end
> end
>
> does not work because, apparently, the first "end" closes both
> "commands" and "define" and there is no file loaded at this time, so I
> get this error:
> .gdbinit:97: Error in sourced command file:
> No symbol table is loaded.  Use the "file" command.
>
> Is there a way around this problem?

There are some ugly things like this.

How about this...

Instead of creating a break_foo_bar macro you instead make a break_foo_bar 
command file (let's say break_foo_bar.cmd) containing:
    break foo
    commands
      print x
    end
    break bar
    commands
      print y
    end

When you want to run this, you type

source break_foo_bar.cmd

If you want, you should be able to maco-ize that:

define break_foo_bar
  source break_foo_bar.cmd
end

and then have a macro