On Tuesday, July 12, 2011 00:24:15 Abhijit Halder wrote:

please do not top post in your replies

> How if we just put a condition check whether the entered string after
> pipe (|) is numeric. For e.g.
> (gdb) thread apply all bt | grep foobar
> Here the entered string after | is grep foobar which is not numeric.
> But here (gdb) print var | 0x50 is numeric.

that wont work as it's "EXPR | EXPR".  so you could do:
(gdb) print x | x

or if your variable was named "vim", it's impossible to determine the user's 
intention if they wrote something like:
(gdb) print x | vim
do they want the variable "vim" ?  or do they want to shell out to `vim` ?

i think we'll have to introduce a dedicated operator here that doesn't show up 
in C expressions.  how about "|&" ?  this is a bashism for doing 
redirection+pipe in one go, so it'll be somewhat familiar to people.

along those lines, i wonder if generic redirection operators would be useful 
too.  something like:
(gdb) thread apply all bt >& file
-mike