Question

During many, sometimes inundating, debugging sessions using DDD, I stumble upon loops. And I keep pressing next to get past it, and if there are many iterations, I just set a break point right after it, and press “continue.” Is there any other way to go past loops?

Answer 1

You want the “until” command – see the gdb manual at http://www.gnu.org/software/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. It is
like the next command, except that
when until encounters a jump, it
automatically continues execution
until the program counter is greater
than the address of the jump.

This means that when you reach the end
of a loop after single stepping though
it, until makes your program continue
execution until it exits the loop. In
contrast, a next command at the end of
a loop simply steps back to the
beginning of the loop, which forces
you to step through the next
iteration.