Re: usability: exiting from GDB

[John Pye <john.pye@anu.edu.au>]

Hi Andrew

Thanks for clarifying. Indeed you are right and the GDB behaviour does
mirror the behaviour of other shells. I hadn't considered the case of
stopped jobs, which I guess *is* analogous.

So the only outcome from my issue was the missing newline when GDB exits.

Thanks all for your comments and feedback.

Cheers
JP


Andrew STUBBS wrote:
> John Pye wrote:
>> The ctrl-D behaviour is what I would prefer, certainly, and this would
>> be more shell-like. But I don't like the confirmation question "Exit
>> anyway?".
>
> It *is* precisely shell like. Try this:
>
> bash$ cat &
> bash$ <Ctrl-D>
>
> bash says:
>
> There are stopped jobs.
>
> [1]+  Stopped                 cat
>
>> The hook-quit thing does turn off the confirmation in the case of the
>> "q" command, but *does not* work for the ctrl-D exit method.
>
> As advertised.
>
>> I guess the main thing is to get the ctrl-D functionality right.
>> Presuming that others agree that this change would be desirable?
>
> I think everyone is agreed that the Ctrl-D behaviour is precisely the
> same as that of bash and other shells, with the one exception that it
> does not print a line break.
>
>> I find the ctrl-C behaviour unhelpful (ie suggesting I quit instead of
>> asking me if I'd like to go ahead and do it) but it's not important
>> really.
>
> The Ctrl-C behaviour is also only cosmetically different. It's hard to
> see how to explain this any more clearly than has already been done,
> but here goes.
>
> In both cases Ctrl-C interrupts the currently running command:
>
> bash$ cat
> <Ctrl-C>
> bash$
>
> (gdb) continue
> Continuing.
> <Ctrl-C>
>
> Program received signal SIGINT, Interrupt.
> 0xblahblah in ?? ()
> (gdb)
>
> In neither case does it quit the "shell".
>
> When you Ctrl-C a continue command it prints a message explaining
> where the inferior program has stopped.
>
> When you Ctrl-C another GDB command it prints a message 'Quit' to tell
> you that the command exited early, potentially. If no command was
> running then the effect is *only* that you see this message. It is
> *not* any sort of suggestion. If it did not print those four
> characters, 'Quit', the behaviour would be exactly the same as bash.
>
> GDB could certainly improve it's Ctrl-C handling - there a many
> commands that just can't be interrupted - and perhaps the aesthetics
> could also be improved, but in principle it is exactly the same as
> that used by bash.
>
> Hope that explains it for you
>
> Andrew