Re: Turning off printing of char pointer contents

["Ray Bejjani" <ray.bejjani@gmail.com>]

Thanks! That should do it. I can set regions, but I cant set (or even
show) the inaccessible-by-default setting . It's in the manual, and
I've tried it with 6.5 and 6.6 (in case it was new) but it simply
doesn't know what it is. I don't know if it matters, but I'm
cross-debugging a coldfire, so maybe it isn't supported (of course, I
cant seem to set it in my x86 one either).
I get:
(gdb) set mem inaccessible-by-default on
No symbol "mem" in current context.

Thanks again, sorry for being quite useless.

On 5/31/07, Jim Blandy <jimb@codesourcery.com> wrote:
>
> "Ray Bejjani" <ray.bejjani@gmail.com> writes:
> > 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?
>
> Have you looked at "Memory region attributes" in the GDB manual?  You
> can define memory regions, and then use 'set mem
> inaccessible-by-default' to tell GDB not to touch memory regions you
> haven't defined.
>