Question

and I would like to know if there is any way to stop a program when is using a function from a certain file. Ideally what I am looking for is something like:

GDB Stop when use a function from file foo.cpp 

The reason to do this is because I am debugging a code that is not mine and I do not know exactly what functions are been called and what functions are not. Is there a function in GDB to do what I am looking for, or any other recommended way to do something similar?.

Thanks

Answer 1

Step 1: construct a list of all functions defined in foo.cpp
The simplest way I can think of (assuming you have binutils and GNU grep):

nm a.out | grep ' T ' | addr2line  -fe a.out |   grep -B1 'foo\.cpp' | grep -v 'foo\.cpp' > funclist 

Step 2: construct a GDB script which will set a break point on each of the above functions:

sed 's/^/break /' funclist > stop-in-foo.gdb 

[Obviously, steps 1 and 2 could be combined ;-]

Step 3: actually set the breakpoints:

gdb a.out (gdb) source stop-in-foo.gdb 

Looking at this answer, an even simpler (if you are on Fedora Linux) way to find out which foo.cpp functions are called:

ftrace -sym='foo.cpp#*' ./a.out 

Too bad ftrace man page says this isn’t implemented yet.