Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 4 - DEVELOPER TOOLS GUIDE, Manual

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12 Chapter 4. Getting In and Out of gdb
gdb -silent
You can further control how gdb starts up by using command-line options. gdb itself can remind you
of the options available.
Type
gdb -help
to display all available options and briefly describe their use (
gdb -h
is a shorter equivalent).
All options and command line arguments you give are processed in sequential order. The order makes
a difference when the
-x
option is used.
4.1.1. Choosing files
When gdb starts, it reads any arguments other than options as specifying an executable file and core
file (or process ID). This is the same as if the arguments were specified by the
-se
and
-c
(or
-p
options respectively. (gdb reads the first argument that does not have an associated option flag as
equivalent to the
-se
option followed by that argument; and the second argument that does not have
an associated option flag, if any, as equivalent to the
-c
/
-p
option followed by that argument.) If the
second argument begins with a decimal digit, gdb will first attempt to attach to it as a process, and if
that fails, attempt to open it as a corefile. If you have a corefile whose name begins with a digit, you
can prevent gdb from treating it as a pid by prefixing it with
./
, eg.
./12345
.
If gdb has not been configured to included core file support, such as for most embedded targets, then
it will complain about a second argument and ignore it.
Many options have both long and short forms; both are shown in the following list. gdb also recognizes
the long forms if you truncate them, so long as enough of the option is present to be unambiguous.
(If you prefer, you can flag option arguments with
-
rather than
-
, though we illustrate the more usual
convention.)
-symbols
file
-s
file
Read symbol table from file
file
.
-exec
file
-e
file
Use file
file
as the executable file to execute when appropriate, and for examining pure data in
conjunction with a core dump.
-se
file
Read symbol table from file
file
and use it as the executable file.
-core
file
-c
file
Use file
file
as a core dump to examine.