Re: Turning off printing of char pointer contents

[Jason Molenda <jmolenda@apple.com>]

You can limit the amount of data printed, e.g.

(gdb) set print elements 15

But you'll need to unset that limit to see the full contents of  
strings during your debug session.

J

On May 31, 2007, at 3:38 PM, Ray Bejjani wrote:

> Hi,
> I'm trying to turn off printing the contents of char pointers. I'm use
> GDB to debug an embedded app remotely. In some instances the pointers
> are left uninitialised and can point to sections of memory that cause
> system crashes when accessed (or they cause external hardware to
> change state when read). I am using DDD on top of GDB but I can
> reproduce the issue with GDB as well. GDB seems to treat C strings in
> a special manner, attempting to print the contents until it sees an
> null terminator or hit the limit set by the "print elements" setting.
> My system crashes when this happens.
> Unfortunately, doing a set print elements 0 is interpreted as no
> limit. Are there any other settings I can use to suppress this
> feature? In particular, I would like it to treat char (or unsigned
> char) pointers like it does other pointers where it doesn't attempt to
> dereference them. I would still like to be able to display/print the
> contents of strings when needed but only on demand. Failing that,
> where in the code should I look to try and force this to not happen?
>
> Thank you,
> Ray Bejjani