Modeling With Data

Tip 15: get GDB to print your structures

PDF version

Part of a series of tips on POSIX and C. Start from the tip intro page, or get 21st Century C, the book based on this series.

level: intermediate debugger
purpose: look at the state of your data in different ways

GDB lets you define simple macros, which are especially useful for displaying nontrivial data structures--which is most of the work one does in a debugger. Gosh, even a simple 2-D array hurts your eyes when it's displayed as a long line of numbers.

The facility is pretty primitive. But you probably already wrote a C-side function that prints any complex structures you might have to deal with, so the macro can simply call that function with a keystroke or two. For example, I use pd to print apop_data structures via this macro:

define pd
    p apop_data_show($arg0)
end
document pd
Call apop_data_show to display an apop_data set.
E.g., for a data set declared with apop_data *d, use pd d.
end

Put these macros in your .gdbinit.

Notice how the documentation follows right after the function itself; view it via help user-defined or help pd. The macro itself just saves a few keystrokes, but because the primary activity in the debugger is looking at data, those little things add up.

To give a more involved example from the data structures I deal with in my work, the apop_model object has a list of settings groups--doesn't this already sound like a pain to inspect? So I wrote the following macro, with its accompanying documentation. This was enough to turn debugging these settings groups from pulling teeth to, um, cuddling puppies.

I don't expect you to follow the details of what it does, but as a somewhat exceptional case, you can see how much you can do: if argument one is apop_mle, then $arg1_settings → apop_mle_settings, and turning the same text into a string isn't an awkward exception like with C's macro processor.

define get_group
    set $group = ($arg1_settings *) apop_settings_get_grp( $arg0, "$arg1", 0 )
    p *$group
end
document get_group 
Gets a settings group from a model.
Give the model name and the name of the group, like
get_group my_model apop_mle 
and I will set a gdb variable named $group that points to that model, which you can use
like any other pointer. For example, print the contents with
p *$group
The contents of $group are printed to the screen as visible output to this macro.
end

I partly needed this because you can't use preprocessor macros at the GDB prompt--they were subbed out long before the debugger saw any of your code, so if you have a valuable macro in your code, you may have to reimplement it in GDB. At least writing these things is quick.

For more examples, I put a list of my favorite gdb macros for the GSL, SQLite, and Apophenia elsewhere on this site.

One last unrelated GDB tip, and then we can go back to C technique next time. Add this line to your .gdbinit to turn off those annoying notices about new threads:

set print thread-events off

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