At present, there is no way to pass the output of a gdb command
directly to the shell for further processing. For example, something
similar is not permitted:
    (gdb) thread apply all bt | less

This kind of feature is quite helpful in a scenario where a program
under debugger has hundreds of threads running and one wants to
examine the stack-trace of all the threads at once. The current
behaviour of gdb makes it somewhat difficult since the entire output
of gdb command (sometimes more than a number of pages) is dumped onto
the screen. One can always redirect the output of gdb using logging
mechanism, but that requires offline analysis of the log-file which
may not be acceptable in certain situations. Another option is to get
a shell using gdb's shell command, but that forces one every time to
source the shell profile. Furthermore, the log-file contains entire
debug information, parsing that huge file is resource and time
consuming.

I have implemented a feature which will allow one to pass the output
of any gdb command to the shell for further processing.

2011-07-09 Abhijit Halder <abhijit.k.halder@symantec.com>

   * top.c (execute_command_to_pipe): New function.
    (parse_for_shell_command): New function
    (execute_command): Update.
   * ui-file.c (gdb_modify_io): New function.
   * ui-file.h (gdb_modify_io): Prototype.

 top.c     |   74 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
 ui-file.c |   15 ++++++++++++
 ui-file.h |    3 ++
 3 files changed, 91 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

Regards,
Abhijit Halder