Re: [PATCH 0/6] Implement the ability to start inferiors with a shell on gdbserver

Sergio Durigan Junior
2017-01-03T20:23:14Z

On Friday, December 23 2016, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> From: Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj@redhat.com>
>> Cc: palves@redhat.com
>> Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2016 22:39:15 -0500
>>
>> This patch series took a long time to complete due to many and varied
>> reasons, but finally here it is.
>>
>> It implements the "startup-with-shell" feature on gdbserver. This
>> means that it will be possible to start inferiors using the shell
>> (instead of calling execv*), which brings many advantages.
>>
>> First of all, it will be possible to use I/O redirection, variable
>> substitution and globbing expansion on gdbserver just like we do today
>> on GDB. This is great because, among other things, it brings
>> gdbserver on a pair with GDB when considering the Feature Parity
>> project.
>
> In Windows native debugging, GDB doesn't use the shell to start the
> inferior, but redirection is still supported via special code in
> windows-nat.c. Can this be made available also in gdbserver?

Looking at windows-nat.c, it seems that the code responsible for
implementing this behaviour is not complex, so in theory it should be
possible to make it available on gdbserver without much effort. I don't
feel I'm the best person to hack this, though, because I don't use
Windows and cannot reliably test the feature.

Thanks,

--
Sergio
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