Question

At the moment I’m using an eclipse-like IDE and the corresponding debug perspective, that most of you are probably familiar with. While debugging code I quite often find myself stepping through many lines of code and observing variables and double checking if everything is as it is supposed to be.

But suppose there is something like this:

1. important line, e.g. generating a new object;
2. another important line, e.g. some tricky class method;
3. for (int i = 0; i < some_limit; ++i)
4.     some_array[i]++;
5. more important stuff;

Obviously I’m interested in what happens in lines 1,2 and 5 (I know this is a poor example, but please bear with me for a little while longer) but I don’t want to step through all hundreds (or even thousands) of iterations of lines 3/4.

So, finally, my question: Is there some way to step directly over the for-cycle? What I do right now is set a new breakpoint at line 5 and let the program run as soon as I hit line 3 and I believe this is not an optimal solution.

edit: The eclipse implementation of what ks1322 proposed is called “Run to line” and is mapped to ctrl-r

Answer 1

Use until command instead of next.

From gdb documentation:

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.

If you will use until instead of next, gdb will step over loops only once, which almost exactly what you want.