Invoke gdb to automatically pass arguments to the program being debugged

Question

I\'d like to write a script that (under certain conditions) will execute gdb and automatically run some program X with some set of arguments Y. Once the program has finishe

Answer 1

If you want to run some commands through GDB and then have it exit or run to completion, just do

echo commands | gdb X

If you want to leave it at the command prompt after running those commands, you can do

(echo commands; cat) | gdb X

This results in echoing the commands to GDB, and then you type into the cat process, which copies its stdin to stdout, which is piped into GDB.

Answer 2

After trying all of the answers here,

1. The echo/cat hack, while clever, breaks quite a few important features of gdb. Most notably, all user prompts are answered automatically (so you don't get a chance to confirm potentially dangerous operations), and Ctrl+C (to stop a process that you are debugging) ends up killing cat, so you can't actually talk to gdb after that.
2. The -x option is supposed to work, but I couldn't get it to work with my version of gdb, and it requires a temporary file.

However, it turns out you can just use -ex, like this:

gdb -ex "target remote localhost:1234"

You can also specify -ex multiple times to run multiple commands!

Answer 3

The easiest way to do this given a program X and list of parameters a b c:

X a b c

Is to use gdb's --args option, as follows:

gdb --args X a b c

---

gdb --help has this to say about --args:

--args Arguments after executable-file are passed to inferior

Which means that the first argument after --args is the executable to debug, and all the arguments after that are passed as is to that executable.

Answer 4

there is option -x, e.g.

gdb -x gdb_commands exe_file

where gdb_commands can be for example (in the case of android emulator):

target remote :5039

Answer 5

gdb target -e "my-automation-commands"

my-automation-commands containing anything you would normally want to run,

break 0x123
set args "foo" bar 2
r

Not strictly a temp file, if you have a few standard init scripts ;)

Answer 6

With bash you can create a script that give user like input to any executable you're executing:

#!/bin/sh
gdb X <<GDB_INPUT
pwd
run X a b c
quit
GDB_INPUT